Does Your Business Need An External Marketing Firm?

Does Your Business Need An External Marketing Firm?

Marketing firms are rife in 2017, and show little to no sign of slowing down their growth, but why do companies choose to hire external marketers, instead of doing it in-house?

Businesses across the globe employ the use of external or third party marketing firms in order to advertise their business, for the simple reason that someone else may be better at it than you are. If your company provides a service, it can often be easier to have a dedicated team of people working on your advertising and sales than it is to train your staff to juggle in-house responsibilities along with sales targets. This is mostly the case with larger firms, and those with a blanket-sellable product.

Services are the easiest for a business to export the marketing for, as the third party can simply be given a comprehensive guide to the service and what the business offers, with no need for expert training. Any large scale service has a simple choice to make at some point in its life; to train or to export responsibility. Oftentimes, it is much cheaper to hire an external firm to do all of the advertising and marketing of a service, while the third party can also continue with its other responsibilities such as to other clients. Marketing is a full time job, and requires a very specific type of person to do well; it’s very hard to train someone to be ‘good’ at sales or marketing.

Hiring a third party is simple, and frees your staff up to do the more mundane tasks of making the business run successfully on the back-end. Unfortunately, the third party will never be experts in your field, as they are trained in other aspects. If there’s ever a particularly difficult situation, it’s always best to transfer to a company representative to sort out, rather than muddle through with less information.

Most small and medium sized businesses do not need to hire an external marketing agency, but most would still benefit from having one. Agencies have access to tools which are not publicly available, and the resources to take advantage of any situation. Marketing does not stop at the advertisement, but follows the full process of enquiry to sale to delivery, and it’s crucial that your company trust your marketing agency. There have been times where marketing agencies have taken advantage of businesses, but fortunately there is plenty of legislation in place to stop this from occurring today.

If your business is small, or in an emerging market, then the best policy would be to include marketing in your daily duties, at least while the job is small enough to be managed by a single person. Once your company begins to grow, and time allocation becomes an issue, it becomes more important to have someone specifically responsible for marketing. Most of the time, marketing can be managed by everyone doing a small part, or one dedicated person, but after this point you will need a budget for it. Now, at this early stage in development, a business does not need a full-time dedicated team, but it also cannot do it with a part time staffing; this is where an interim marketing team comes into play. Until your business is successful enough to hire someone specifically for marketing, why not make the most of your resources and outsource to an external manager? It’s simple and effective, and you should always have at least one member of staff involved in marketing; without it, a business is doomed to fail.