Compare Your Marketing Agency to the Alternative, Not the Almighty
Should you hire an agency?
Joe Biden isn’t exactly an agile messenger these days, but he deployed a good message vis-à-vis Trump in 2020 that has stuck with me: “Compare me to the alternative, not the almighty.” I think about this a lot as it relates to business hires. The agency hiring process, in particular, would be a lot more productive for both parties (the agency and companies hiring agencies) if it were considered this way.
Consider the case of a startup with no marketing team thinking about bringing on a marketing agency (this, of course, is entirely unrelated to the situation of many adtech companies thinking about hiring yours truly). This is an especially hard decision for the CEO because they don’t have any marketers, nor, perhaps, have they ever hired an agency. So, they essentially have no context for the decision, which makes it very likely that the agency will end up getting compared to the incomparable almighty.
Agencies themselves play into this. Transform your business! 10x the return on your investment! You will be flooded with leads from top-of-funnel marketing efforts that are very hard to connect to leads! I’ve been operating Sharp Pen for three years now, and I’ve tried out these messages myself.
A more realistic but still compelling way to think about hiring an agency is the same way you think about B2B marketing in general: the point is to build your reputation and relationships. The first part of that is devising a differentiated story that puts white space between you and your competitors while galvanizing your customers. The second part is amplifying that story day in, day out via social content, PR, owned content, and other means.
The result will be a more differentiated and robust reputation as well as more and stronger relationships with customers and those who influence them. The outcome of that stronger reputation and those stronger relationships is more business. Simple as that. Being top of mind, being distinct, and being trustworthy helps you win more deals. It ain’t magic. It could be but (like any one thing in business) probably won’t be a total transformation. It’s the slow, boring work of building a more prosperous company.
The way I’d contextualize the efficacy or impact of the agency, then, is to compare it to the outcomes you can expect to produce by allocating the same amount of funding to another resource.
For example, consider the aforementioned hypothetical startup that is essentially looking to make its first marketing hire. The company needs someone to do the strategic work of marketing: identifying that differentiated, galvanizing story and figuring out how to amplify it to create impact — plus the tactical output of someone who is willing to get their hands dirty. The company could hire a CMO who will run them $300k+ per year, but they probably don’t want to spend that much on a full-time strategic leader, and those people often aren’t willing to roll up their sleeves. Or the startup could hire a marketing manager and hope they’ll grow into a strategic role, but that person will likely cost $150k+ anyway (all in: compensation, benefits, payroll taxes, etc), and in that case, you’re hoping that someone will do the work of a strategic leader for the price of a tactician, which is always a gamble.
Against these alternatives, the marketing agency will, for many startup CEOs, be a more reasonable option. For the same approximate price of the full-time marketing manager (let’s say $150k/year), you should get an account lead who could be a CMO (which means high-level strategic insight) plus the tactical output of media relations and content creation (which may be done by the account lead or a more junior person with the former’s supervision). Strategy and tactics for the price of a full-time tactician with a lot less headache and no need for training. Not a bad deal.
The same applies to a more mature organization with a marketing team of twenty (though these companies, for the obvious reason of the context at their disposal, can generally make this calculation). The question for them is not necessarily whether a $150k-200k/year hire is going to transform their business. It’s whether that person has capabilities or bandwidth the in-house team does not and whether their impact will be equal to or greater than the cost of a manager-level full-time employee who costs the same. Again, you’re comparing the agency or consultant to the alternative, not the almighty, and in that case, the value (or lack thereof) is easier to assess.
Of course, hiring an agency isn’t always the right answer for a company seeking marketing help. It may make more sense to hire a full-time employee or not to hire a marketing resource at all. For example, maybe you do have the budget for a full-time strategic leader and want someone who will coordinate extensively with other internal personnel. Or maybe you have strategic leaders in-house and want to hire a cheaper, junior person who can grow into a senior role. Or maybe you’re just not yet ready to hire a marketing resource because you’re still chasing your first $1M in revenue. All possible.
But if you are ready to make a marketing hire, put them in the context of other potential resources you could enlist to build your reputation and relationships. Otherwise you’ll be making the hire with unrealistic expectations. And that’s the recipe for a quagmire only God can fix.
