Limited Marketing Budget? Hire an Agency!

I think a lot of people have this exactly backwards. They reason, “Man, if I only had a fatter marketing budget, THEN I would go out and hire an agency to push our Brand!” I feel bad that so few seem to understand the flaw in that perspective. In reality, it’s only the big boys with the biggest marketing budgets that can afford to do their marketing in-house. Everybody else — the ones with a limited marketing budget – needs to save money by hiring an agency.

Get more marketing, for less money!

I already know what you’re thinking, “Yeah, right! You work for an agency, so of COURSE

you’re going to tell me that it’s cheaper to go with you guys!” (Wow, you don’t even know me and you’re already doubting me!) Just hang with me for a few minutes here, and I’ll make a pretty strong case for you. Let me start with a quote from Joshua Steimle’s recent post at Forbes.com:

“…running an effective online marketing campaign [in house] will cost you at least $3,000 per month, and your competitors may be spending several times that… The cost of hiring an in-house SEO professional worth his or her salt will run at least $50,000 per year, including benefits and overhead. That’s for an entry-level SEO professional, wet behind the ears, with a few months of experience. An experienced SEO professional with two to three years of experience will run you around $70,000 in the most affordable markets… Surveys… might lead you to believe you can hire a great SEO professional for $30,000 per year, but you can’t. Someone who is doing SEO for $30,000 per year, in the United States, is either incompetent or underpaid. If the former, then you won’t get the results you want. If the latter, it won’t be long before you have to double his salary in order to keep him or see him get hired away.

I wrote a post last week, giving 3 DIY Marketing tips to help people get started on their own as they begin launching their online presence. There’s a certain amount of marketing that a person can (and should) do on their own when they’re getting started. But once you grow your business to the point where you simply MUST do more online marketing, but CAN’T come up with the time or expertise to do it on your own, you’ll face the decision to either bring a person in-house as your “marketing dude”, or to hire an agency to do the work for you.

How much can your limited marketing budget get for you?

You can read a lot of articles about the decision to hire a marketing agency or to bring it in-house. In fact, our own Samantha Collier gives you 3 Reasons It’s Time to Hire a Social Media Agency. There’s no “one-size-fits-all” type of answer for this dilemma. But let me tell you what you get for $2,000 or $3,000 a month if you hire an agency like ours (Shift Digital Media).

1. You get Samantha, a Social Media Expert, to trace out a social media plan for your company, and to even help you implement it. She has done this very successfully for many companies for many years. She will make sure that your Brand is getting talked about in the right circles, for the right reasons.


2. You get Nicole, who will make sure that the different features of your overall Digital Marketing Plan are being carried out according to the strategy and according to the agreed-upon time-line. She’s got a LOT of pieces to keep track of so that your Brand gets moving forward in a consistent way.


3. You get Bill, our most experienced expert in Branding, Business Development and overall Digital Marketing, to walk with you each step of the way, providing you with the benefit of having helped many companies just like yours, and answering your questions.


4. You get Jags who will trouble shoot the site issues that creep into your website. I wish it weren’t true, but websites sometimes sprout a mind of their own, and wake up with crazy ideas about how to mess up your site!


5. You get me, too! I’ll help you develop the core message for your brand, and design a strategy to produce content pieces (whether written or other media) that will slowly build your brand’s recognition, authority and trust. I’ll help you optimize each piece of content (or we’ll do that for you) so that it is found by engines and appreciated by the right readers.


6. You get our support staff that does a hundred “little things” in the background that keeps it all moving in the right direction, with the right online signals.

A marketing fantasy?

Do you really think you can hire a “marketing ninja” that has all this expertise rolled up into one person, and have them come work in-house for you, covering all the bases, and doing it all for $2,000 a month? Instead of fantasizing about that, why not take advantage of having our entire pool of expertise and experience working for your Brand, and just pay us 2 or 3 thousand a month?

You don’t have to hire our team (although I’d highly recommend it!); but when you’re facing the decision of using your limited marketing budget to either hire an in-house marketing-dude or to hire an agency, I hope you’ll save some money and hire an agency.

via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/marketing/limited-marketing-budget-then-hire-us-0593302?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=limited-marketing-budget-then-hire-us