In House Marketing vs Agency | Should You Hire an Agency?
Guide Contents:
- Perfecting The Sales Funnel
- Dial In Your Numbers
- Learn About The Advertising Platforms
- Dial In Your Tracking
- Figure Our Your Numbers First
- So Should You Hire an Agency?
In House Marketing vs Agency
So we’ve probably worked with you know six or seven different agencies across multiple businesses over the past about ten years, and almost every single one of them has been a complete disaster. Now I don’t want to blame that on them completely because a lot of it’s on us to see what the problem is. So when you have a new business that’s growing, and maybe advertising isn’t really your thing, or you feel like you’re running out of time and you want to just hand your advertising off to somebody else, you think you know what am I gonna do? What are the benefits of in house marketing vs agency?
Oh, I’m gonna hire an agency. They’re gonna crank this thing, they’re gonna make me profit, they’re gonna help scale this thing, and I’m gonna go live on a beach somewhere. Problem is, is it usually doesn’t work like that. I think the first reason that it usually becomes a problem is you try to hand them something that’s completely unproven.
Perfecting The Sales Funnel
We’ve made the most mistakes, like hiring agencies before we really have the sales funnel dialed in, and so we just handed them a completely new thing. Or we were creating a sales funnel on the fly, and then basically started working with them to start scaling ads at the same exact time.
What happens then is we’re telling them, hey your ads are not working, you’re not being a good agency, and they’re telling us hey your sales funnel suck and that’s why this whole thing isn’t working. The problem is you need both, and so what I found is the best way to make this work is to get your numbers dialed in first. So this would apply if you’re advertising on Amazon, but especially if you’re advertising you know the stuff on your own website. You’re running Facebook ads, or Google Ad Words, or YouTube ads, or any of that sort of stuff, I would recommend doing that yourself first for a couple reasons.
Dial In Your Numbers
First, it allows you to really dial in your numbers because ideally what you want to do is you want to prove out the numbers first. You want to know how much it costs to get a click, to get an impression, to get a lead, to acquire a customer, you want to know all that stuff before you hire an agency. So that when you hire an agency you know that their job is just to scale it and make it better, not to sort of create magic out of nothing. So I recommend figuring it out yourself first.
Learn About The Advertising Platforms
It means you’re gonna have to learn a little bit about the advertising platforms which to me is really the second benefit. I don’t think you want to be hiring an agency to do something if you have no idea what’s going on, because you’re not gonna know if they’re doing a good job or not. Maybe they come from a referral or something but there’s no guarantee there either. They may be really good at advertising health supplements for example, but they’re terrible at advertising kitchen products. You never know, and so I would recommend learning it yourself first. You don’t have to be the world’s greatest expert you know I would recommend just going through the basics, going through a few different courses on whatever ad channel it is that you want to hire somebody for. Run those ads yourself, just do a very basic approach, run the ads yourself and really know your numbers.
Dial In Your Tracking
Another big benefit of this too is being able to dial in your tracking. I’ve seen more of this stuff fail when the tracking is not good. So you’re better off sorting that out on your own dime rather than spending you know a lot of times these agencies are gonna have a for $5,000, $10,000 a month minimum. So you’re gonna be paying them that amount of money while your tracking is broken. Once again terrible use of money, terrible use of time.
Figure Out Your Numbers First
It’s better to figure your numbers out first then go hire an agency and when we’ve done that that’s when we’ve seen the real magic happen. We have an agency that works for a new e-commerce business, and I was actually working with him, he’s a friend of mine. But, I was working with him for a couple months tweaking our ads making sure our tracking was going and there’s 1-point where the tracking was completely wrong. I’m glad we figured that out before we started paying him thousands and thousands of dollars a month to manage our ads.
So we really dialed that in and then we hired him when the results were consistent. They weren’t as good as what we wanted, but they were consistent and we knew he can make them better. That’s when we hired him to really scale things up and it’s worked incredibly well. Incredibly well, because where the agencies really add value is in scale, because whenever you’re running ads you just maybe have like one audience and then a handful of campaigns you’re managing. Not a big deal, but when you start pushing volume and you need tons of creative because of the burnout that happens when you’re advertising a lot.
When you need tons of creative or you need to test tons of different audiences and that sort of thing that’s where agencies can really help. They can help you scale that stuff where that’s you know essentially becomes like a full-time job and is probably not how you want to spend the rest of your life. That’s what they do and that’s what they do great.
So Should You Hire An Agency?
So if you were to ask me should you hire an agency? Should I do in house marketing vs agency? I would say first have you proven the funnel out yourself? Run the ads yourself and see if you’re producing consistent results. If not don’t hire an agency. Get that piece first otherwise you’re going to waste a lot of money. If you have done that then fantastic, hire an agency and watch them like a hawk, it’s your money they’re gonna be spending and most of them are just gonna be getting a percentage of ad spend which means that you know the good and the bad are going to be incentivized just to spend more money.
Now the good agencies will be respectful of that and will not try to waste your money. But, everyone’s gonna want to spend more money so you want to make sure you’re watching them like crazy. So hopefully this helps because an agency can provide a lot of good things for your business, but only if you do it at the right time. If you found this video on in house marketing vs agency helpful go ahead and like it below but more importantly subscribe to our channel because we’re gonna be putting out a whole lot more content that’s going to help you become financially successful and build a successful e-commerce business so hope to see you in the next video!