Marketing and sales are becoming increasingly complex.
In the early stages of business growth, most companies have a limited number of employees, and the owner is driving the majority of sales and marketing. When a company is ready to take off, it needs to expand its reach significantly. That requires a stronger investment in sales and marketing strategies.
Many decisions need to be made about the most effective way to get new business: use traditional approaches like cold calling, direct mail, T.V., and billboards, or more digital-type approaches like website development, blogging, email marketing, and social media?
The owner, who is fulfilling many of the key functions of the business, usually needs expert help to develop and execute the right strategy. The next decision is whether to hire internally or outsource to a marketing company.
Option 1: Hiring Internally
With limited resources, it could be tempting to hire a “marketing person” and think that is enough to move your business forward to the next level.
One of the biggest issues to take into consideration is that it’s almost impossible for one person alone to possess all of the necessary skills. For example, it wouldn’t be realistic to think that one person would be able to drive strategy, design your website, write the code to program it, write your web copy and blogs, do social media, create your brochures, and so on.
To give you an idea of all the roles that need to be filled to implement a marketing plan, check out this article: 12 Marketing Job Descriptions to Recruit and Hire an All-Star Team. Then, download the 37 Ready-to-Use Marketing Job Descriptions.
If you’re going to hire internally, you either need to hire a “marketing person” and outsource on the side anyway, or hire a full crack team to launch your growth.
Option 2: Outsource Marketing Services
Building an internal team is a great option if you’re a big enough company to support it. Unfortunately, for smaller businesses, the cost can be prohibitive.
Hiring an outsourced company to manage your marketing operations can offer the skills you need – when you need them. For example, if you only need a programmer 25% of the time, that’s all you pay for. It’s true that the hourly rate for an outside programmer might be higher than what you would pay if you hired someone internally. But – you don’t have to pay for:
- A full-time employee when you don’t have enough work to fill a full-time position
- Someone to hire and manage the programmer
- Insurance, vacation, taxes, etc.
Outsourcing can be a great option for smaller companies because they can get all the skill sets of a full marketing team without having to pay for a team of full-time employees. But - not all outsourced marketing agencies are cut from the same cloth.
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