Why You Shouldn't Hire A Marketing Company/Agency or In-House Marketer Yet
In this guide, you'll learn what's best, hire a marketing company, agency, an in-house marketer, or option #3 (which we'll discuss later), which nearly guarantees your marketing and sales efforts will be helpful. Marketing is confused with branding. Some people think it's branding, some think it's sales, some think it's scammy, and that it should be beautiful. Nope.
The True Purpose Of Marketing
The purpose of marketing, precisely what I call Growth Marketing, is to take your prospective customer and guide them to connect with your product or business. Then turn them into a paying customer and bring them back to your business to buy more. Marketing's most crucial function of your business, more important than your product, is more critical than your operations, more critical than your engineers. If you don't get a customer, how will you function? Coaches, consultants, and entrepreneurs running 6, 7, & 8 figure businesses understand their customers.
They call them to buy, and marketing is an essential part of planning in their businesses and not an afterthought (like most companies). Depending on your business type, 90-100% of your growth marketing can and NEEDS to be automated. Your focus is on managing and growing your business and not on hoping a customer comes in the door.
Who Has Your Best Interest in Mind When It Comes to Your Business?
Is it that Marketing Company or Agency you might hire to help you plan a strategy and implement it in the way they know? Would it be that in-house marketer you want to hire or currently work for your team doing your social media and putting up your website? Or would it be that in-house marketer who manages the marketing agency or company for your company?
It's you. You have your business's best interest in mind because it's your company, it's your project, it's your passion, and your livelihood is at stake. Whether you deal with a marketing agency or company or an in-house marketer, you need to understand effective growth marketing processes to lead your in-house team or agency to accomplish the results you want.
How To Treat Marketing Companies / Agencies
I would treat the marketing agency, company, or in-house marketing team like you would treat a real estate agent/broker or a stockbroker. You want them to perform the action you request of them and not necessarily rely on their advice. Most people have their own biases. Like a marketing agency's goal, individual personal goals are not necessarily for your business to thrive.
It's for them to charge you much money for as long as they can to pay their payrolls and make a profit. Your in-house marketers have similar goals, to keep their jobs and make money so they can live their lives. If you have a fantastic culture, you attract people who want to make a difference, and your company's goals are life-changing.
Let's jump into the pros and cons of each type of marketing and why option #3 is the best place to start or the best place to focus on in your business.
Option #1: Marketing Company / Agency
These are the marketing companies that rarely specialize in a kind of marketing. They say they are good at search engine optimization (SEO), website design and development, social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC), video production, content writing, reputation management, conversion optimization, email marketing, etc.
Pros
Suppose you don't have a start place for your business or website. In that case, they can give you an idea or help you develop how to market your business potentially.
They can help you create websites and set up advertising accounts
They can design your logo and brand colors
If you have an excellent system for converting people, you can work with a specialized marketing company or agency to amplify your efforts with ads or something else they specialize in
They can create content for you in the form of articles, videos, and other mediums.
Cons
Agencies can be costly because they must pay for overhead (rent, payroll, marketing tools, advertising, prospecting, bonuses, etc.)
They usually don't understand your business as well as you do
Many of their employees have never run a business before and don't understand that when they spend $4,000 over budget, you have to make a lot of sales to cover that or pay from your personal savings account
Many agencies do too many types of marketing they are not good at and, at times, will subcontract out to contractors for work they've never done before
Many agencies have very junior marketers who can push buttons but not make a lasting growth conversion system for you
They want to keep you as clients for as long as possible, even if they don't get you results because they need revenue from you to keep their business going (this also means they do not want to give you keys to the kingdom, and they want to hold you, hostage)
The up-charge you an arm and a leg for website hosting and other services and sometimes don't even allow you to edit your website or accounts
Conclusion:
Having worked in marketing companies and agencies and seen how they run from the inside, you should often stay away unless you know what you're doing and what you want them to accomplish. They can only help you as far as you understand your marketing and how you will convert customers and fulfill your product.
How To Select A Marketing Agency or Company
Now, I want to make sure that if you're going to select a company, you check for the following:
Ask them to show you proof of the results they are claiming about their previous clients. Sometimes with an NDA, they can't offer you everything, but they can show you something.
Ask them for specific results, not just that their branding efforts had 10,000 impressions, but how did those efforts increase sales. They'll usually say branding can't be tracked, and at this point, you want to work with someone focused on getting you revenue, not brand exposure.
If they worked with a business similar to yours, ask them the cost to acquire the customer and how much revenue was generated and ask for proof. If they talk about only getting you leads, you probably shouldn't work with them because paying customers is all that matters. You can get 10,000,000 leads with 0 customers.
Ask for references to their current and previous clients, at least 2 of each, and call them.
Know what you want from an agency and focus on a specialized agency. If you want a website, speak to marketing firms that create unique websites that make sales. If you have a product conversion process that works, get an ad agency focused on Facebook or Google Ads to amplify your efforts—hiring a specialized copywriter or agency if you want effective sales to copy written for your ads and emails.
Please read the contract they make you sign, and do not lock yourself in for a year. Go month to month and ensure there are no cancellation fees. This is not an exhaustive list of things to ask or do when selecting a Marketing Agency or Company. Still, it will help, and you'll disqualify many people.
Only Work With Agencies If You Know What You're Doing
Treat marketing companies and agencies as brokers, and you want them to do the work you assign and understand yourself. Agencies don't have your best interest in mind, and their goals often conflict with yours.
Option #2: In-House Marketer / Team
You likely start by hiring a generalist who understands copy, advertising, email marketing, website conversions, SEO, and other marketing channels in this route. You'll probably hire a Marketing Director and hire more specialists as the results this team produces are apparent.
Pros
Usually cheaper in terms of upfront cost compared to agencies
If you hire the right person, they can help your business grow fast
You have more control of the deliverables
An in-house team is usually more dedicated to your business than others
Cons
Hiring wrong can cost you much more in mistakes and wasted time
Most junior marketers are learning on the job and have no idea how to help your business
Many marketers coming out of college have no valuable skills
You must pay them regardless of the results
Conclusion:
Having worked alongside a lot of new/experienced marketers, even those with prestigious MBAs, they usually don't know what they are doing and much of the time need someone to tell them what to do. Some marketers who specialize in one thing and a business does not succeed on social only, ads only, a website, need a complete system. Many of these marketers have never run a business. They can spend a lot of money getting tools that cost thousands of dollars a month and produce a couple of hundred dollars per month in results.
How To Select Your First Marketer
Again, I want to make sure you're at least equipped to get the right first marketer if you're going to hire one and you understand what you're doing:
You want someone experienced in setting up marketing systems, people who can automate a lot of your marketing.
They have run their own business and have worked for other people before, and probably working for someone right now (unless their goal is to transition).
They like a challenge, and they are self-managed.
Hopefully, you already have a working conversion system to convert customers. You want this person to amplify current efforts and develop new channels to bring people in.
You want someone who can demonstrate results and understand your business and customers better than you can.
You want someone who can write sales, copy, and content copy, which speaks directly to your customers.
You want someone focused on Growth Marketing. These are measurable direct results, and if $1 is invested, they can track it to generate $2.
They need to understand some HTML, CSS, and javascript to set up tracking for your website.
This marketer also need to understand whatever website solution you are using (I recommend wordpress as a content management system) so that they can deploy pages, help you rank for SEO, and more
Also, even though I said they should understand sales copy, they also need to be a content marketer who can develop articles that your customers are looking for.
You do not want a marketer who doesn't share their knowledge. You want what they do to be documented and repeatable (don't get held hostage!). Phew, that's a lot of stuff you're looking for. Depending on where you hire this first marketer, it can cost you between $65,000 to $125,000 a year for the right person. But if you find the right person, they can generate 20x or more their cost $1,300,000 to $2,500,000, and even more in revenue and profit because they set your system upright.
Only hire a marketer if you understand precisely what you need them to accomplish.
Who you hire is only as good as you in articulating and getting your sales process set up to work consistently. You can employ Star Marketers (think Michael Jordan of Marketing). Still, these people are usually already working and growing a business massively and not looking for a low-paying job. You need to understand marketing and growth yourself to create an effective in-house marketing team truly.
Option #3: Set Up Your Own Predictable Growth Marketing Machine
Now, option #3, I think, is the best to start with because whether you choose to hire a marketing agency, company, or in-house marketer, #3 will amplify the results these other people can give you. If you select option #3, you might be your in-house marketing director and grow your company six figures, seven figures, to 8 figures, and beyond. People often choose route #3 and hand it off to the right people to scale it even better. Most folks I've coached, consulted, and worked with think of marketing as an afterthought.
Build It, And They Will Come!
They set up a business, and no one buys. They don't know why. If I set up shop, shouldn't people automatically come to my door and buy? Nope. You have to build a growth accelerator system like this:
This system is predictable and allows you to augment what is working and make changes as you find things working better or worse. As mentioned before, you can automate 90-100% of this process. If you build it yourself, you'll see better results than relying on someone else to make it.
Get a Detailed Breakdown of the Growth Accelerator System
See how this system has worked for six different companies in very different niches, from coaching, consulting, software, education, parenting, and a local business
The 4 Parts of the Growth Accelerator System
The 4 Parts of the Growth Accelerator system are:
Targeted Traffic
Conversion System
Experiments & Feedback
Implement Changes
You don't need to be a marketing or growth expert to set up this system. Generally, if you were an expert, you'd probably overthink it and not put it together in the first place.
Component #1: Targeted Traffic
The most crucial step in marketing is putting your product/business in front of the right people. You can have a mediocre product, and modest conversion system, and significant targeted traffic and still make good sales. You need traffic from all sources, organic, paid, social, video, referral, etc.
Component #2: Conversion System
Now, if you have the right message, with the right product, and significant targeted traffic, you can have great sales. You need a system and process through multiple channels to convert people into customers. Depending on where they start in your conversion process, that fresh new prospect will precisely time emails if they give their email, with specifically timed ads based on the actions they've taken, to keep moving them through the conversion process. It's not very hard to put together, it just requires a little bit of thinking and some of the available templates we created at Growthy.com.
Component #3: Experiments & Feedback
This step is often overlooked. When you set up your growth accelerator system, you need to test things, test offers, test headlines, test emails, test advertising channels, and it's straightforward to try these things with the right tools. When you know the two most important metrics in your business, you can run experiments all day long or hand them off to a conversion optimization expert.
Component #4: Implement Changes
The last and most crucial step is implementing the changes 100% from your experiments and feedback. And it feeds right back into your traffic because your traffic will see your changes, and you'll gather more results in your conversion system to keep improving your strategy. This allows you to scale, start spending four figures per month, to 5, to 6, and even seven figures per month on acquiring customers predictably. YOU WANT TO BE IN CONTROL OF YOUR DESTINY When you understand and can implement simple yet powerful growth marketing processes into your business, you and lead the right people to help you scale the process. It all starts with you, though. Take control of your destiny and build your own Predictable Growth Marketing Machine
6 Case Studies of the Predictable Growth Marketing Machines
To be in control of your future, you must watch this presentation and see how six companies were able to implement this predictable down to the dollar growth marketing machine into their businesses