As many business experts and gurus will tell you, part of being a success in business is recognizing that you can’t do it all.  Developing the skills to delegate is critical. This allows you to have the opportunity to not only take unneeded work off your plate but to use your employees/team to the best of their abilities. Overall, this means more efficiency and fewer headaches.

However, the delegation strategy does have its limits, namely when your business has a task in front of them that’s outside the skillset of your current team. This isn’t an indictment of your team, but a basic reality, especially when it comes to something like marketing. For example, effective web copy and content requires knowledge of writing, while on average, many workplaces need more people with effective writing skills. In the same vein, creating visual content may require knowledge of graphic design, which your team might not have.

At this point, most businesses are at an impasse and have to make the decision on whether to hire an in-house team to handle these tasks or delegate a step further and bring on an outside agency. The notion of having your own team to tackle these specialized issues may sound good — but for most businesses, the agency is the better option. Here are some of the key reasons why.

How Using An Agency Helps You

A Better Financial Setup

It makes sense to try and start with the bottom line, right? Part of the reason that businesses start putting together larger advertising and marketing campaigns in the first place is that they believe they are going to get a return on their investment. Part of the issue here, though, is that a lot of people don’t understand what that actual investment is in the first place. At first glance, you may think that having your team will actually save you money, right? Not necessarily, at least—not if you want the best. Look at some of the average figures for key marketing positions:

• Marketing Manager Salary: $120,000 per year
• Social Media Manager Salary: $50,000 per year
• SEO Manager Salary: $60,000 per year

Depending on the size of your business and your needs, you may actually need someone in each of these roles, as well as people to work under them, which means even more financial investment. On top of that, you’re not factoring in the cost of setting them up with the tools they need to do their jobs. For example, a basic ad campaign may require a stock photo website subscription and Adobe Creative Suite. SEO experts need keyword research platforms like Ahrefs to create an effective strategy. Combine all these together, and you could be paying thousands on tools alone to support your teams.

By comparison, while you may be paying a monthly fee to an agency, that fee is inclusive of both the work of the agency, as well as their tools. If you don’t anticipate constantly putting out new campaigns, you’re virtually guaranteed to pay less overall to use an agency rather than getting a team of your own together. Some businesses try to have their cake and eat it too, working with solo freelancers or bringing on less experienced candidates to fill roles on their team. This has its drawbacks as well.

Stronger Pool Of Talent

Just to be clear, there are many qualified freelancers out there to help with your marketing. The issue is that while they may not cost as much as an employee, good freelancers know their worth, and you will have to pay substantially. In addition, it may be better to bring on an agency’s team to try and handle your workload rather than to try and put it on one person, no matter what their qualifications.

The same thing applies for people who try to get the best bargain possible when trying to fill out their own teams. Yes, that fresh college graduate or person getting back into the workforce may be willing to be your SEO manager for $30,000 rather than $50,000, but what expertise are they bringing with them? Ultimately, if you get cheaper talent on your team, but end up not being happy with the work they do, then you’re losing money. This isn’t just due to paying the employee you brought on, but having to bring on another one to fix what they started. Not all small businesses have the budget to take that loss.

Time Saved

Going hand-in-hand with this is time. The fact of the matter is that building an effective team from scratch takes time, no matter what type of skills they individually bring to the table. You need to figure out how to manage them, how they will communicate with each other, and take the time to bring them up to speed with what their product is and how you want it advertised.

With a marketing agency, you save a lot of this time because the procedures have already been established on their end. All you need to do is start by explaining what you want.  They will have the skill set to put the rest into action. The only other time you need to spend is giving approval for the final product.

Industry Insight

As a final point, an in-house team can easily fall into the trap of getting tunnel vision. Inside the company bubble, people may only be exposed to certain materials or frames of thinking, when diversity in mindsets is proven to be a benefit. This is a place where an agency can help. Because an agency is an outside entity, there’s less of a reticence about presenting potential issues or suggestions to issues they see with your current marketing. What you choose to do with that information is up to you, but having it is the key.

Another thing that you get when working with an agency is a better awareness of trends that may affect your marketing. Your in-house team will have their noses to the grindstone, and while this is great, it means there’s little time to stay on top of trends and technology. For example, could a Google algorithm change affect your SEO strategy? Is a new form of advertising taking hold of your target demographic? Agencies need to know this to compete, and they can share this wisdom with you if you retain their services.

What Should I Look For In My Agency?

With all this said, it’s clear that an agency offers a faster and more effective way for companies to get marketing and advertising initiatives off the ground compared to hiring and training an in-house team. With this mentioned, it’s also important that you do your due diligence in choosing what type of agencies you work with. Ideally, you’re going to want an agency that not only has a proven track record, but also is known for helping put together effective content in your niche. This is what makes Glint Advertising a perfect match. Whether you are still in those skeletal planning stages or ready to take action, we have the expertise and experience to make your advertising plans a reality. Reach out to us for a free consultation today.

Most people believe that John Wooden goes down in history as being the greatest basketball coach to ever live and with a winning percentage of .804 and over 10 NCAA championships… well, let’s just say that here at Glint we certainly can’t disagree with this belief. What’s interesting is the greatest basketball coach of all time won 80% of the games he played, which is a mind-boggling percentage but during his 29 years as a college coach, he lost approximately 162 games.

That is a lot of lost games.

In fact, if you were to stack these losses on top of one another, it would equate to 5.5 basketball seasons (years) of straight losses. The point we are trying to make here is that building a championship basketball program is not unlike building a championship brand–– it takes time, it takes patience, it takes resilience, it takes devotion, and it takes the ability to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. And just like a college basketball program must stick together through the highs and lows of their journey towards greatness, companies and agencies must do the same in their journey towards building a championship brand. Both brands and agencies should prepare and expect to encounter rough waters, and when they do, they need to remember they are on the same team.

Here at Glint, we would never take on John Wooden when it comes to coaching basketball, but we know a thing or two about coaching and building great brands–– in fact, since 2000, we have been doing everything in our power to help brands make the best decisions and create the highest ROI. We believe there are a number of skills great advertising agencies must have to successfully build a great brand, but today we are going to concentrate on three core competencies–– Branding, Copywriting and the ability to blend old practices with new ones.

Understanding the Art & Science of Branding
Branding is much more than just a logo or a symbol; it is the art and
science of aligning what you want people to think of your company with what they actually think of your company. It is a promise of what consumers can expect when they purchase your product or service.

At Glint, we are experts at branding, and everything we do begins and ends with the brand in mind. Our attention to detail in regards to branding has allowed us to help build world-class brands and movements like DSG Arms, Think Before You Sleep and Kaner Medical Group. You can read more on the art and science of brand building here.

Writing Dang Good Copy
Bruce Bendinger, one of the world’s greatest copywriters to ever live, said it best when defining copy—

“Copywriting is a job. A skilled craft. Verbal carpentry. Words on paper. Scripts to time. And one more thing. Salesmanship.”

Now, this definition is perhaps a bit romantic/dramatic, but we are an advertising agency, we live and die in the pursuit of creating the perfect ad. Writing copy lays the foundation of the brand and is one of the essential steps of branding, which we discussed in our earlier point. Here at Glint, we strive to write copy that ignites something in the customer, that moves them into action, that evokes emotion and that ultimately get them to bite. You can read more about the process we take when writing copy here.

Merging the Old with the New
While both branding and copywriting are concepts that have been around for ages, advertising and marketing practices are constantly changing. A great ad agency must have the ability to blend the old with the new––merging the old foundational elements of advertising, like branding with the new more innovative practices like integrated marketing, social media marketing and of course Search Engine Optimization.

While new technology allows us easier access to a wide range of audiences and customers, these mediums are useless if we aren’t practicing the foundational elements of advertising and marketing.

Understand What Makes a Great Agency & Together Have the
Patience, Resilience, and Devotion to Build a Great Brand
The goal of this article is to help you understand the skills and expertise it takes to build a great brand so that you can choose the right agency to partner with. If your advertising agency is currently doing the things we mentioned above, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. You just need to trust in the process and remember to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. While John Wooden’s losses were far from pleasant, they ultimately were what allowed him to win 10 NCAA championships.

At Glint, we are more concerned with winning our brands the championship, and that takes both time and patience. Our goal is to be proactive and work through challenges that inevitably come when competitors try to take the lead in the ballgame.

While we may lose the occasional game, we always take the series and ultimately win the championship. If you’re ready to win, reach out to Glint at www.glintadv.com or give us a call at 817-616-0320.