What are the pros and cons of hiring a Digital Marketing Agency
Imagine, how your business would be doing without marketing?
It will practically be standing nowhere… Now, imagine how your business would be doing without digital marketing? Yes, practically you won’t be standing nowhere, however, you would be missing big time as far as market reach and impact is concerned.
Now, to be able to take your business to full potential, you need dedicated digital marketing experts who can take your business to places where your audience are looking for you. For instance, let’s just assume you are a web design agency. Now, no matter how high the demand for your services is, unless your audience is able to find your business, you won’t be getting any benefit from your business.
Again, keeping in view the market trends where an overwhelming majority of audience prefer digital channels to find respective services/products, you need to hire digital marketing specialists who can take your business to platforms where your audience are.
Now, there are two ways to achieve it; either you hire a freelance digital marketing consultant/agency who can take care of your needs, or alternatively, you can venture a DIY project to take care of your digital marketing aspects.
So, what’s the best approach to tackle digital marketing need?
Well, below we will be looking at some pros and cons of each of the two models; hire freelance digital marketing specialists Vs DIY project and leave it up to you to decide which model works best for your needs:
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Quality
– DIY
Benefits: No one knows your business needs and requirements better than you and, in this case, you are in charge of the quality material that you would like to have for your business.
Limitations: While you may have the best understanding of your business needs, you might not necessarily have the skills to get it done. Again, coming back to our example of web design services, while you may be the top-of-the-line web design business, however, you might not have the expertise to market your product and pitch your business in front of potential customers.
– Freelance Digital Marketing Consultant
Benefits: When you hire a freelance digital marketing consultant you have access to professionals who have mastered the field and has expertise in advertising and communications required to increase your chances of getting noticed by potential customers.
Limitations: While the specialist may have the best in line expertise in advertising and digital marketing techniques, he/she won’t be an expert in your field, which means that the person may not be producing the quality of material which you may want. However, since you won’t be having a direct say in the process, you can’t control the quality of the material produced, rather trust them for their expertise in the marketing domain.
– Digital Marketing Agency
Benefits: The biggest benefit of hiring a freelance digital marketing agency is the fact that you are actually partnering with a team of professionals who have the experience and diversified resources to make things happen in your field. Moreover, as an agency, they will have their internal quality control systems to filter our irrelevant or below par material.
Limitations: Just like a freelance specialist, the agency may not have the robust expertise in your field like you do (however, the quality control will certainly help improve the quality). However, the high rates of hiring a digital marketing agency are the biggest con in this aspect.
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STRUCTURE
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DIY
Benefits: As part of the business, you and your team understand the systems and structure of our business best as well as know how different things work and where do you fit in.
Limitations: Sometimes you need to watch from a distance to have an objective view of the situation. That’s also true for you. While you are part of the system, you might not be able to look at the situation or needs of your business from an objective viewpoint.
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Freelance Digital Marketing Consultant
Benefits: As a person viewing your business from the distant as well as having experience in digital marketing, a freelance specialist will be able to understand your business needs from customers’ viewpoint.
Limitations: As a lone warrior, a freelance digital marketing consultant might not have the resources to cater needs of a medium or large business. Moreover, as a freelancer, he/she would have his/her other commitments, which will influence his/her priorities for your business.
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Digital Marketing Agency
Benefits: As a professional agency with in-built systems and processes, a digital marketing agency will be in a much better position in terms of resources and capabilities to handle the requirements of companies of all sizes. Moreover, as the agency will be working as a standalone, they will be able to build an objective view of your business (customers’ viewpoint) and deliver accordingly.
Limitations: Many businesses hire digital marketing agencies as a backup plan, which might affect the efficiency and effectivity of the services. In essence, when you hire a specialist digital marketing agency, you should take it as a partner and an extension of your team to squeeze the most benefit out of your investment.
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ASSURANCE
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DIY
Benefits: While you work on your own project, you can stay assured of the marketing material produced and when or how you would need them because it’s actually being produced from your own backyard.
Limitations: Complacency is the biggest factor to watch-out here. While you can stay assured of the material, it is easy to get complacent, which will directly translate into unwanted hiccups in your marketing plans.
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Freelance Digital Marketing Consultant
Benefits: In terms of freelancer, the level of support or assurance you may expect from the person directly related to the professional integrity of the freelancer. For the most part, you would stay in the dark as far as the level of support and assurance from the freelance digital marketing specialist is concerned; that is unless you have prior working experience with the person.
Limitations: As a single person, you can’t depend on the level of support and assurance from a freelancer as much as you can depend on a digital marketing agency.
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Digital Marketing Agency
Benefits: As far as assurance and support are concerned, digital marketing agencies with proper infrastructure and diverse resources are better equipped to give you a deeper pool of services and expertise.
Limitations: Again, the level of assurance and support you can expect from a company is often related to the agency’s code of conduct and integrity. However, in this case, you might be able to filter the agencies by viewing past reviews and feedback from previous customers.
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RESULTS
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DIY
Benefits: As the business owner, you would do your best to ensure getting the best results. In this case, you’ll also be able to look and analyze the result of your efforts firsthand.
Limitations: Again, no matter how hard or how sincerely you try you don’t have the expertise in digital, neither know the nitty gritty of the trade to adopt best practices. Moreover, getting insights into the analytics and unveiling the hidden picture shown by analytics is also a hard-earned trade which you as a beginner might not be accustomed to leverage completely.
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Freelance Digital Marketing Consultant
Benefits: As a freelance digital marketing specialist, it is in the interest of the person to deliver you the best results in a bet to improve his chances of keeping his job and getting hired by others as well.
Limitations: For most parts, when you hire a freelance digital marketing specialist, you hire a person who has expertise in one domain, for example, you’ll rarely find a digital marketing expert who has the designing or writing expertise as well. Thereby, your chances of getting overall results are slim in this case.
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Digital Marketing Agency
Benefits: Digital marketing services offered by expert agencies are driven by measurable results. Since the agency is working on a large scale, they most likely have all the necessary (supplementary) resources that are required to bring you the best results as well as key patterns from analytics; so that you stay aware of your project and what they have achieved for you.
Limitations: There are no particular client-side cons as far as results from a digital marketing agency are concerned.
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Cost
– DIY
Benefits: While you work on your project, there is no expense to burden your budget. However, given the diversified resources, you will have to arrange on your own, going DIY for digital marketing services might not be as economically feasible as it may seem from a distant.
Limitations: When you decide to go with a DIY a project, you will most definitely need a professional in-house team to get things done right and that can cost you even more than hiring a digital marketing consultant or agency plus the cost included to build the workplace and technology
– Freelance Digital Marketing Consultant
Benefits: In terms of cost efficiency, going with a freelance digital marketing specialist is perhaps the most cost-efficient approach amongst the three options. In fact, this is the key selling point which freelancers sell to grab more projects.
Limitations: There are good freelancers and not so good freelancers. While you may look to save some cost by choosing a cheaper option, you may end up with a totally unprofessional person and ruin your project.
– Digital Marketing Agency
Benefits: Hiring a digital marketing agency for your marketing needs is the wisest decision in terms of cost-benefit analysis. While this will be more expensive than freelancers, given the multiple resources working on your project this definitely is worth your money.
Limitations: As said above, hiring agencies will be more expensive than a freelancer, however, given the multiple resources, that’s totally justified.
Concluding:
Well, at the end of the day, choosing the right approach depends upon your business needs and bottom lines to be achieved. As they say, there is rarely one size that fits all, you need to choose an option that fits your requirements because you are the only person that truly value your business as well as the only person who’s going to gain or loss from your business success or failure.
At Digital Gravity we feel proud to offer completely customized and tailor-made digital marketing services that fit your unique business needs. Call our experts today and let us know how we can take your business to new horizons.
