So, you run a thriving tech business, you’ve built a team, maybe you’ve even hired marketing staff, but you’re not seeing the growth you expected. Chances are you have gaps in the marketing team that you can’t afford to fill right now, or can you?
Engaging an external growth agency can seem a little daunting when you’ve gone to the trouble of building a scaled-down version in-house. But, as they say, you don’t know what you don’t know. Just one flaw in your armor can leave you vulnerable. One stone left unturned can mean thousands in lost revenue. It’s time to consider using an external agency.
How Much Does It Cost?
The cost is always offset by increased growth and revenue. It doesn’t actually cost anything. Engaging an external marketing agency is a way to increase revenue, not draw revenue away from your bottom line. The value exceeds the retainer fee.
There’s several reasons hiring outside can make sense. Let’s look at a few of those reasons.
Access To Resources
Most firms would assume that hiring an outside agency is an internal skill-set issue or team immaturity, that’s not true for the most part. You can have a fantastic internal team and still have gaps in your marketing. These gaps usually come down to time, budget, and personnel.
Your internal team might be stretched in one or more areas. You might not have the time available to execute a larger growth strategy if your current team is already stretched to breaking point. Perhaps they just don’t have the required skills yet. Building a team, subscribing to the required tools and resources, building the marketing infrastructure, it all takes time and money.
Hiring an external team fast-tracks your plans. You hire the specialist you need, when you need them, at a cost that’s clearly lower than doing it from scratch internally.
Access To Experts
Marketing all-rounders are useful, but there comes a time when you need to engage a specialist. This is where an agency makes perfect sense. Getting access to a CMO, designer, copywriter, web developer, conversion and optimization specialist, automation expert, PPC specialist etc, can make all the difference in getting measurable results.
Access To A Sharper Skillset
Internal marketing teams have a few major drawbacks. The biggest is a slightly myopic viewpoint. Working with one business, all the time, allows atrophy within the team and can lead to “things are going ok” thinking.
An agency works with a wide portfolio of clients and therefore has a much larger view of the industry. Recent changes in your industry are probably top-of-mind for an internal team.
Changes in marketing as a whole, though, are probably slipping through the cracks. Since an external team is constantly being challenged by new clients and even newer marketing methods, the skill-set tends to be sharper. It’s just a natural result of working with a broad range of clients and having access to a broader range of feedback from all corners of the marketing spectrum.
Access To Tools
Executing a strategic marketing plan seems easy until you’ve tried to do it. One barrier is simply access to the correct tools. Since most of the tools required are subscription based, it can start to add up. Engaging an external growth agency means getting access to all those juicy bits of tech you wish you had the money and time to implement.
Access To Revenue (through cost saving)
Of course, the biggest reason to engage a marketing agency is to save money, while it might seem incongruent (spend money to save money), it isn’t. Let’s say you wanted to execute a fairly basic marketing campaign you might need:
- A graphic designer and video editor to visually tie-in all those pieces of content
- A copywriter to make sure the messaging is clear and on-brand
- A web developer to build out new landing pages and manage plugins
- A PPC expert to run ads against the creative
- An analyst to evaluate all the above and make sure your marketing is returning a worthwhile ROI
- SEO specialist, to give your content the platform it deserves
- An account manager to make sure everyone in that list above is doing everything they can to get the results the client wants.
For reference, here’s what it can cost to hire those specialists should you choose to do it in-house.
- Graphic Designer £30,000 – 40,000
- Web Developer £32,500 – 52,000
- Copywriter £25,000 – 55,250
- Pay-per-click Specialist – £37,000 – 42,750
- Analytics Specialist £40,000 – 55,250
- Project/Account Manager – £40,500 – 45,000
If a business hires all the above, which is the bare minimum for a marketing department, excluding a CMO, it will cost £205,000 for entry-level employees and £290,250 for somewhat seasoned professionals. That’s excluding IAAS, tools and software, ad spend budget and benefits to keep the staff engaged long-term.
And last, probably the biggest reason we recommend engaging an external team is driving and tracking leads.
An outside agency can build on the work an internal team is already executing. The revenue garnered from a new lead is very specific to your business, but a single lead might pay for months of the agency’s retainer fee.
That’s assuming one lead, converted to a client. Now extrapolate that across multiple lead generation streams, converting at a higher rate than your in-house team (because of the specialists we mentioned above), suddenly it all makes sense.
Hiring an external growth agency as a complementary arm to your existing team is not only a smart move that saves money, grows revenue and gives you access to new tools. It gives your in-house team a chance to work alongside some of the best in the business, allowing them to upskill through osmosis.
Summary:
This is a rundown of what an external agency could do for your in-house team if engaged correctly. Rapid growth in the tech space requires a diverse skill-set and access to methodologies and tools outside the scope of a small in-house team.
We aren’t saying you can’t do this by yourself, we believe in you.
What we are saying is, with the diverse range of professionals available from a seasoned B2B marketing agency; why would you make it any harder than it needs to be?
