Costs of an external marketing partner

We can notice that a company needs one form or another of marketing to put itself out there in the market and drive sales for the business, but the question that many entrepreneurs are still pondering over is: should I have an in-house team or an external marketing team? The answer to this depends on many things and one size doesn’t fit all in terms of solutions regarding a marketing team. Therefore, in order to ease up for this decision, we wrote an article on how much does an         in-house marketing team costs.This article will continue to answer the second half of the question, which is what are the costs of an external marketing partner. The main points that we will cover are:

• The benefits of an external marketing partner;
• The challenges when partnering with an external marketing team;
• The costs of an external marketing team.

Benefits of an external marketing partner

If you decide to engage the services of a marketing agency, you need to understand the advantages and disadvantages that go into such a major decision. To name a few of the benefits that you can get:

1. Probably the biggest advantage a business can get from hiring another team to do its marketing is the time aspect. If we think that “time costs money”, then having an external marketing team surely takes off your shoulders a lot of time that you can allocate for your core activities.
2. Another great advantage is that you pay people that are experts in their field and have experience with many clients, big workloads and are up to date with trends and shifts in more markets. They have a wide set of skills that is hard to reunite in a single team in a company,
3. The last advantage for externalizing your marketing efforts is that there are a variety of budgets to match to different services. This means that with the budget you have, you can negotiate what kind of services you need and you can be advised as well for what to choose.
4. You can hire a team of specialized marketers today and shortly after they can start working to achieve the objectives that you set together. Basically, you have immediate access to specialized skills.

Specialized agencies have a closer relationship with third-parties such as ash media outlets and marketing platforms that would cost you less if you have a marketing agency as a partner to do your marketing. This means that you could get deals that are advantageous for you cost wisely that otherwise, with an internal marketing team you might not have. This, in essence, lowers the overall costs of promotions. For small and medium-sized companies, these relationships that an agency has could be a big financial advantage.

Challenges when partnering with an external marketing team

One main challenge that you face when you decide to partner with an external marketing team is that you do not have the same control over people, tasks, allocation on projects and so on. Therefore, you need to take the risk of not receiving materials exactly as you want and having sometimes delays due to communication not being necessarily as fast the one you can have with the people inside of your company. This could be solved if you establish clearly what are the means and communication routine and stick to the expectations that you set at the beginning of the partnership.

The costs of an external marketing team

The costs of an external marketing partner vary based on what skills and knowledge your business needs in order to succeed on the market and which one of these you need to temporarily hire from other sources. Many people get scared away because of the costs they assume a marketing agency has. Often times, in a meeting with a client and an agency the client will say “This is too expensive!”, but the question is “It is more expensive in comparison with what?” Agencies do not have their prices put up front for everyone to see, but we can give you a few tips & tricks to navigate through this dilemma:

1. As a company that wants to hire a marketing team, it is important to first decide why you need to hire an external team and for what purpose. What are the needs that you want them to address?
2. Now that you know what you want to accomplish with a new partnership, prospect the agency’s market, what services each offers and what reputation they have.
3. You can book consultative spaces with various agencies that made it in the “I want to work with them” list and see what they can offer you for the budget that you have. This is especially important for small to medium-sized firms that cannot afford to spend money and not get any ROI. Also, you need to check the availability that each agency has for your specific project.
4. After you had meetings with a few desired marketing agencies, you take some time to decide what kind of expertise you really need and what budget you can afford to spend. After this process, the final decision about which agency you will hire should be easy to reach.

Final thoughts

There’s no clear-cut yes or no answer regarding the question “should I have an in-house team or an external marketing team” because success largely depends on how well a company is able to work with either of these options. Instead, we support the idea that a business needs a dedicated marketing team that has the experience, tools, and knowledge to help products or services get exposure to the market.

If you want to book a meeting with us to discuss what your company’s marketing goals are and how we could support your business, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!