When Is It Time to Hire a Marketing Agency?
You started a business, and it’s been growing. Whether it’s through a referral network you built, trade shows you’ve attended, or just the time you’ve put into your social media. You are living a good life, right? Probably not just yet, because as your business grows, more and more things need your attention. So, outsourcing and looking for help is key to the next stage of your growth.
One question most business owners ask us is, “when should we hire a marketing agency?”
This is a question we get asked a lot, and because we’ve helped hundreds of businesses find the right marketing partners, we can help you on your journey to hiring a marketing agency. Whether you are making 6, 7, or 8 figures in your business, the lessons here will apply as your business grows.
1. Need a Strong Marketing Strategy
You have no marketing strategy in place. As a business owner, you usually need to throw things at a wall and hope some of them stick. If you are lucky, some do, and we begin to make money. So logically, it makes sense to do the same thing and see where it can go. But at some point, you will hit a wall because there was never any real strategy in the first place. No real understanding of who your customer truly is, what they care about, or why they buy your products.
If you have a good idea of the above, ask yourself, what data do I have to support this? And if I showed this data to someone else, would they come up with the same conclusion? If you don’t have that, it’s time to hire a marketing agency to help. Once you’ve established the above, you can begin building a marketing strategy to move the business forward with laser focus rather than the spray-and-pray approach.
2. Need More Resources
Do you have tasks that take up to much of your time? A business consultant once said, “measure your hourly rate; anytime you are doing a task that someone else can do for cheaper, outsource it.”
This is great advice and a measurable way of knowing when it’s time to let go.
Say you make $80 dollars an hour in your business.
Time spent on marketing tasks:
- 15 hours a month on social media
- 20 hours on writing SEO content
- 15 hours managing your PPC spend
- Not to mention the time to engage with your audience and customers
- You are effectively a $4000 marketing agency that still has an entire business to run from strategy, operations, financials, and more.
At this point, it’s time to start outsourcing things one by one. Say you hire a copywriter to write your blogs, saving you 10 hours, and a social media person to then create content from the blogs. Another 10 hours saved. Slowly but surely you get different aspects of your marketing taken care of, so you can focus on growing the business and increasing your hourly rate.
And guess what? As your hourly rate increases, you can outsource even more.
Now if your business is in the 7 to 8 figure range, your hourly rate is much higher than $80 an hour; you could be breaking $1000+. So, any time wasted on the small things costs you money. Find solid agencies, hire someone to manage the marketing agency partners and focus on the big-picture strategic thinking of your business.
3. Losing Opportunities
Are you are stuck doing the day-to-day marketing tasks to get your business to grow, but you are also the person bringing in business? Every hour you waste on the small execution tasks takes away from building connections and your business.
Marketing is a long-term game, so the longer you stay in the weeds, the less your business is going to have the potential to grow. You must focus your time and attention on things that will move the business forward 100% while letting an agency or team manage your marketing growth. If you do both at the same time, your business will compound, and you have a flywheel effect that lets your business sore.
4. Need to Learn New Digital Strategies
The learning curve is high for some digital strategies. If you are doing multiple aspects of marketing in your business, from website updates, to PPC and SEO. You must spend time learning these skills, and continue to stay up to date.
At CJAM, we know experts in these areas who spend every day in and day out in the marketing world but are only able to keep up due to experience, relationships and ongoing focused growth. What chance do you as a business owner have? Instead, learn the basics, and hire experts to take over. This way you can focus on bigger partnerships, ideas and opportunities rather than focusing on just one aspect of the business.
We wrote an article on how to scale a business with outsourcing, so that we can start taking the first step. Or maybe you’ve already started to outsource and want an Outsource business model for Digital Marketing.
5. You can allocate a % of your revenue to marketing.
Depending on your business, you may have a % allocated to marketing a month. Very similar to putting away 15% of your income into index funds, for example. You know that over time, you will get a return on your investment if things are done correctly. So at what point should you start spending money on marketing agencies?
Well, this answer really depends, but the easiest answer is; when you can cover the cost of outsourcing a part of your marketing with an agency.
Let me show you an example. Say you personally take out $60,000 a year for your salary, and your company makes $110,000 a year.
Take 110,000 *.15 = 16,500.0 and then divide that by 12, which comes out to $1375 a month.
You now have $1375 a month to spend on outsourcing aspects of your marketing. The next step would be to prioritize which activities would give you the most time back if you outsource and the biggest gain over time. Once you know that, you can start searching for agencies or contractors to help.
6. You are losing money and time doing it yourself.
Running different marketing channels takes skill and expertise. You can either spend your own time learning it and burning money while trying. Or find partners who have done it before and can get things going faster.
Running a campaign yourself for 8 months and finally getting it has a lost opportunity cost if an agency can get it to run in 3 months. That’s 5 months of time that you aren’t outpacing your competitors. Those returns will compound over time because you are making less revenue, which means less money to spend on resources that will allow your business to grow.
Now you should have a pretty good idea if you need to hire a marketing agency or partner. It’s time to go do so! Either you can start asking friends, google searching, or ask us at CJAM Marketing. We have vetted over 625+ marketing agencies and partners and work with a vetted list of 80+. We can help consult on what you need and recommend partners to save you time and money. Reach out today.
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What’s Next?
Now that you know a little more about personal branding, it’s over to you so that you can put what you’ve learned today into practice. Of course, if you still need some help with developing and implementing your personal brand, we’ve got you covered there, too.
We specialise in helping people just like you to find the perfect agency to help them out, so reach out to us today to find out more. You can also leave a comment to keep the discussion going or follow us on your favorite social networking sites for more. We’ll see you soon!
