MIM:AGENCY constantly faces problems in its work with clients that are caused by improper organization of the process from the point of view of marketing management. In this article, we would like to list the most common problems in this area and answer the question: is it better to work with one marketing agency or to contact several specialized ones, or maybe to choose freelancers?

The most common problem when a company does not have its own marketing team and works with many contractors

1. Lack of at least one professional marketer in the company. 

Oddly enough, even if you work with one or more agencies, you still need a marketer on staff. And in our work with clients, we always recommend doing just that. Why?   

2. Having one marketer with a considerable amount of work

  • The staff needs a person who will be the link between the agency and the client’s team. If, for example, the client has a medical clinic, someone has to approve posts with doctors, send new information to the agency and generate them, monitor the service and the implementation of recommendations within the business, etc.
  • If a business works with freelancers or an agency and freelancers, an in-house marketer should coordinate their work. The owner is not always (almost never) a marketing professional and cannot do it professionally, nor should he. If there is no such coordination, this leads to constant problems: there is no single positioning, no single analytics system, different people have access to different accounts, and the company does not own the accounts, the visual style is different for everyone because everyone does what they want.

At this stage of development, marketing is a rather complex and diverse science. It is impossible for a single specialist to know SMM, targeting, analytics, contextual advertising, writing texts, design, etc. equally well.  At the same time, owners often hire a marketer and think that he or she will cover all possible tasks in this area. In this case, there are several possible scenarios:

  • The marketer starts to do all the tasks for a long time and is not as efficient as a separate specialist. The owner blames the marketer for not working well and not bringing the desired result.
  • The marketer convinces the owner that they need freelancers or agency services for certain tasks. For example, to find an SMM remotely for 10 posts per month, and to entrust SEO to an agency. The rest of the tasks are performed by the marketer himself. With proper professionalism and competent coordination, this is a pretty good option in an ideal world. However, in practice, we often see that freelancers may not respond for several days or disappear altogether. Agencies don’t pay enough attention to the project because they have a large flow of such clients and pay little attention to each one. At the same time, it’s out of the question to follow any general business marketing strategy.
  • The best option, in our opinion, is when a marketer engages an integrated marketing agency to support them and supervises them. In this case, communication is simplified, all marketing activities are in the same hands and move in the right direction for the business. The marketer, in turn, controls the direction and effectiveness of this movement in accordance with the approved plan. 

3. Marketing functions are not performed by a marketer

Even now, we see a situation where marketing tasks are assigned to a system administrator or accountant. And this is not a joke. We don’t even think it’s worth talking about the correctness of activities with this approach. 

4. Frequent change of contractors and freelancers

In this case, the owner or director thinks that marketing is no more complicated than courier delivery and that changing the contractor will not make things worse. However, this is not the case. 

  • It takes time for an agency or freelancer to understand the client’s business, learn the market segment in which they operate, competitors, product advantages, etc. Frequent changes lead to the fact that contractors are always at the very beginning of their efficiency curve
  • In this case, there is no long-term strategy, because there is simply no one to follow it, and the first priority is to complete urgent tasks. 
  • Contractors are not always conscientious. As a result, access to business pages, previous developments, research, etc. is often lost. Experience is not gained but lost along the way. 
  • Frequent changes of course in marketing are a bad idea. In this case, from the outside, you can observe a constant change in corporate identity, tone of voice, communication failures, the presence of areas that no one controls, and other dangerous things for the company.   

5. Lack of a single comprehensive strategy

At the start of a project, we always recommend that you develop a comprehensive marketing strategy. This delay is not a waste of time and will strengthen all subsequent marketing activities, as they will complement each other in achieving the set business goals and will be balanced.

In the absence of such a strategy, there is no common understanding of such basic marketing things as:

  • What is the current market situation in your niche?
  • Who are your competitors?
  • How are we better and how will we beat the competition?
  • What is our positioning?
  • What are we doing now and what will we do in six months or a year?
  • Who is responsible for what?

The list goes on, but we’d rather write a separate article about the content of a good marketing strategy.

Starting to promote a business without a strategy is like starting a movie without a script. What should the cameraman do? How should actors play? It looks absurd. 

All of this just generates a lot of disordered activities, which will be harder and harder to bring to a single direction. 

6. Constant rush and closing only urgent tasks

In any business, according to the Eisenhower matrix, there are 4 types of tasks: 

  • urgent and important, 
  • important but not urgent
  • urgent but not important
  • not important and not urgent 

It’s not wise to always do only the first type of task. In the long run, this prevents your business from growing. To go beyond this, you need two things:

  • Hiring additional marketing specialists to take on some of the strategic tasks
  • A marketing plan that will allow you to organize all tasks on the timeline according to their priority.

Building your own marketing department, freelancers, or an agency?

Given the situation and challenges described above, let’s look at what options are acceptable for business. We won’t be disingenuous and say that an agency is better for everyone. No, different options will show maximum efficiency for different tasks and stages of business.

1. For small businesses that are not thinking of expanding

If you have one bakery or cafe. You like this business and it brings you pleasure. In this case, you can even do all the necessary activities yourself or hire a freelancer. A good option would also be to hire a specialized agency for specific tasks, such as SEO optimization. 

2. Small or medium-sized business that wants to grow

You opened a small ENT clinic a long time ago, but now you want to grow and become a comprehensive clinic. How to do it right? How to attract clients? What budgets will you need? This is exactly the kind of task a strategic marketing agency is involved in. We will develop a strategy and marketing plan, as well as ensure the implementation of all planned activities. This will save you from many losses and ensure the best results in the long run. The disadvantages of working with many disparate contractors were described earlier.

4. Large and sustainable business

There are two options here.

а) Have and develop your own marketing department. And you should involve an agency only for certain areas of work or types of tasks. For example, creating a brand book or writing a strategy for a new product. It should be borne in mind that for complex work, the department should have at least 10 specialists. You can calculate the budget for their maintenance yourself.

б) One or more in-house specialists and the involvement of an integrated marketing agency to provide the full range of activities. The company’s employees coordinate the work of the agency, which in total leads to a positive result. At the same time, the company saves money because it does not pay for a large number of full-time specialists every month.

5. New projects with long-term investments

At this stage, you can’t do without an agency. And it is better to involve it at the idea stage to test all the necessary hypotheses. Then you can move on to developing a marketing strategy and its further implementation. In this case, again, we recommend that you have at least one of your own marketers on staff from the moment you launch the project to coordinate the agency and the business.

We hope that the article has made it clear how to properly ensure the work of marketing at different stages of the organization’s growth and when an agency can be the best choice for you. 

If you have any questions or want to discuss the support of your project, leave a request in the form below.