We’ve covered a gamut of topics in marketing over the last few months—from tips for hiring a marketing coordinator, how to maximize your marketing budget and tips for welcoming Gen Z young professionals into the work environment. There are lots of factors to take into consideration when it’s time for your brand to invest in marketing support, whether it be in-house, from an agency, or a combination of both.

Making a highly valuable investment is always the goal—but if you’re navigating new waters with branding and marketing, it can be difficult to know which decision will yield the best results for your company. We’re here to tell you that, more times than not, hiring a marketing firm/agency is the smartest investment for your brand. Here’s why.

Marketing firms are specialists, not generalists

As we discussed in our guide to hiring for your marketing department [link], professionals who work in a marketing and/or advertising agency are a group of specialists with dialed-in skillsets, developed over years. As specialists in areas like graphic design, web design, copywriting, social media, digital marketing, UI/UX design, packaging design, client management, and more, specialists offer the following benefits for clients:

• Bandwidth. More time to dedicate to your project needs.
• Consistency. More years of specialized experience result in higher quality, more consistent outputs.
• Efficiency. Marketing specialists can accomplish more work in a shorter amount of time, while still maintaining quality.
• Experience. Marketing agencies typically offer decades of combined experience between all their employees, including senior-level leadership.

Marketing firms are more affordable in the long run

While you may be able to get away with hiring an in-house marketing coordinator for around $35,000 a year, their actual cost is much higher than their salary. As we discussed in this blog post, there are several additional costs that often get overlooked when it comes to hiring a marketing coordinator—or any in-house employee, for that matter. Some of these overlooked costs include:

• Hiring platforms like Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn ads, and recruiting/interview time.
• Employee onboarding including orientation, training and supplies.
• Employee benefits including health insurance, 401k, vacation time, sick time and more.
• Additional resources like laptop, cell phone, ongoing education and more.

By hiring a marketing firm to fulfill your branding and marketing needs, you eliminate all of these costs and then some.

Marketing firms offer different perspectives and a creative approach

As a third-party vendor, marketing firms offer an outside perspective to your business, collected from dedicated hours of industry research, Discovery meetings, and building relationships with their clients to understand exactly where the brand currently stands, where they’d like to go in the future and what is currently standing in their way from accomplishing those goals.

Third-party vendors also allow companies to gain perspective on their brand from an outsider’s perspective. Understandably so, it’s tough for business owners and/or key stakeholders to take their emotions out of the equation when analyzing their brand as it currently stands. Bringing in outside professionals helps put emotions aside and implement the necessary strategies and tactics to move the brand forward.

The Image Shoppe can fulfill your marketing needs!

The Image Shoppe is your trusted Brand Marketing Ally for all things branding, marketing, strategy, graphic design, web design, copywriting, social media, digital marketing and more. We have decades of combined experience as an ongoing brand-marketing partner for a variety of industries, including hospitality and restaurants, manufacturing, municipalities, provisioning centers and more. Contact us today to schedule a consultation call.