Agency, Consultant or Freelancer?
This article is an eight-minute read.
If you are looking for marketing support for your business, you may want to distinguish between the types of support available. Depending on your budget and your specific needs based on your business size, what you sell, and who you sell it to, you do have options. The key is to ensure you understand what results you want to get in the first place.
Your choices fall into three main categories (although you may find cross-over):
Any good marketing agency, marketing consultant, or freelancer will have this conversation with you upfront to ascertain whether they are right for you. If you are interviewing more than one company or individual for your marketing needs, you will undoubtedly get different answers, ideas, and cost estimates from each. The key is to understand what you want in terms of results and deliverables.
Many marketing companies will promote the idea of return on investment. Although hard to measure for all marketing activity, you must understand what success would look like in your eyes. Otherwise, you may spend a lot of money and not get the results that make you feel you have received value.
There is no exact science when it comes to marketing, but there are strategic implementations that can work for most businesses. A lot depends on your budget, of course, and your expectations. From that end, having a frank conversation upfront is essential when interviewing a new marketing agency or freelancer.
Marketing agencies are businesses with multiple team members offering a wide range of individual specialisms in different areas of marketing. It’s like a one-stop shop for everything you need.
They tend to work rigidly in structured processes and workflows to manage their client base and should offer personalised account management. Because of the overheads of running a company with many experienced team members, they tend to be the most costly option for outsourcing your marketing.
Marketing consultants are typically seasoned professionals focusing on strategy and planning rather than day-to-day execution.
They often work independently or with a small support team for delivery. You should expect a senior-level experience, with strategic focus and expertise, advising you on actions through either a project-by-project basis or a retainer model.
Because it is one person, you end up dealing with the senior person for better communication and understanding of your specific needs. As a marketing consultant, they are there to advise rather than sell you a product or service. They should also offer objectivity towards ideas, implementing their experience and understanding against any suggested campaign or strategy.
Freelance marketers are independent professionals who typically specialise in specific areas of marketing, offering hands-on execution of marketing tasks. Their service will be delivered either on a retainer basis or for project-based work, offering you the lowest cost for your marketing deliverables.
If you are actively looking for marketing support and are deciding whether a marketing agency, marketing consultant, or a marketing freelancer would be your best option, here are some final considerations.
With experience heading up a marketing agency, my biggest bugbear was the need to sell products and services when sometimes the advice should be not to. That is why I became a marketing consultant/freelancer.
With a wide breadth of experience and expertise in traditional and digital marketing, Click 71 is positioned to help businesses maximise their marketing budgets on activities that deliver the best results. By working alongside other professionals – such as designers – the breadth of service can cover much of what an agency can offer with a more consultative approach. This understanding is backed up by fast and efficient implementation – delivered by a very experienced marketing professional.
If you fancy an informal chat about what you have and what you want when it comes to marketing and your online presence, get in touch.