As your business grows you might start to hire assistants, marketing coordinators, sales people, or customer service representatives. Each one of these employees is in charge of a very specific task or portion of your business. After hiring one, you might come to find yourself asking a few questions:
- Would I save money if I hired a marketing agency?
- Would my business benefit from hiring experts rather than coordinator level talent?
- Would my business be more successful if I hired an agency?
- Would I receive more leads if I hired an agency?
- When is it time to stop delegating all my marketing activities?
- Am I overworking my staff and assigning them tasks they aren’t trained to do?
Here are 5 signs that it might be time to hire a marketing agency to help. And remember, an agency isn’t necessarily hired to replace your existing staff. Many times, at Market My Market we work with assistants and coordinators to launch full scale marketing campaigns.
Sales Are Slow
You know you have an excellent product or service. You are competitive in the market and you are usually killing it around this time of year. What has changed? How has marketing changed over the last 1-2 years (or even the last 6 months)? Has web traffic dropped? How were people finding you last year around this time? These are questions that need to be answered.
Tasks Are Not Being Completed and Your To-Do List Keeps Growing
As a business owner, you are probably wearing many shoes. Your time is finite and your to-do list just keeps growing. You might start to see competitors adopting marketing ideas that you came up with years ago. You wanted to implement these ideas last season, but ran out of time. “Time is more valuable than money. you can get more money but you cannot get more time” – Tim Rohn
You Don’t Enjoy Marketing Your Business
You’re a plumber, a Crossfit Trainer, a Doctor, or a Lawyer. You love your job for a reason. Your job is your passion and the last thing you want to do is worry about finding new customers. Nothing is worse than a website or marketing campaign that doesn’t reflect your business. Customers see lazy marketing and assume the quality of a business is low. Let an agency help you show your passion for what you do. You will be impressed and your business will grow.
Your Current Team is Frustrated
You haven’t sold a product in days or haven’t had a new sign up in weeks. The morale in the office is low because you are frustrated with your sales team and your sales team is frustrated because they haven’t been receiving any new leads. Honing down on your marketing efforts can help create more valuable and frequent leads. Don’t let frustration spread.
You Don’t Have The Budget To Hire
It is affordable to hire a marketing agency and often cheaper than hiring 1 full-time employee. Hiring content writers, graphic designers, SEO experts, Pay-Per-Click experts, and web designers gets expensive fast. Hiring an agency also requires less overhead like office space, insurance, internet / electric bills. Many times, when you do hire someone, you are also getting someone at a coordinator or manager level who you’ll have to pay more. Agencies have experts who work with multiple businesses in your exact same situation.
You Don’t Know What’s Working
Marketing agencies will provide you with qualifiable results and help you establish KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your business. What really matters to your business? Is it sign-ups, e-mails, new members, cases, web traffic? While Facebook likes may look great, we can tell you it’s not what matters most.
What have you tried in the past? Ask your potential agency for results that show similar KPIs that make sense for your business.
Ask other businesses and your peers if they are currently working with marketing agencies and what made them start.