Marketing agencies can seem a bit of a mystery especially if you have never used one before. In this blog post we will try to cover the reasons why you may want to engage with an agency and the value they can offer you.
A marketing agency can assist your business by creating, implementing and actioning effective marketing plans and strategies. Marketing companies can help by adding extra resource to boost elements of your strategy or by providing specific services such as market research or voice of customer studies.
You can typically hire marketing agencies to work on specific projects or retain continued use of their services using a retainer agreement.
Whether you are a start-up, a small company or a large well established corporation, working with an external agency gives you the flexibility to scale your marketing accordingly, creating an agile and effective marketing machine.
Marketing expertise and resource
One of the biggest reasons why companies look to hire an external marketing agency is to bolster the work of their internal marketing team. Often companies will have one or two marketing individuals who are highly experienced at marketing their own products and brand. However they can turn to a marketing agency to help them fill gaps when they simply don’t have the resource themselves, thus allowing for greater flexibility and a more agile approach to marketing.
It can sometimes be a real challenge for the in-house marketing team to be able to cover all of the many different aspects of the marketing mix, an external agency has the ability to add extra depth and breadth to campaigns by adding further areas of expertise.
For a start-up or smaller company there may not be the budget available for a dedicated in-house marketing resource or team. In that instance an agency will be able to act as the companies marketing resource, offering a full marketing service to the company.
Creative ideas and an external perspective
One the main benefits of using an external marketing agency is the new injection of creativity into your marketing activities, and there’s no doubt about it, creativity breeds engagement with customers.
Keeping all marketing within the in-house company bubble can sometimes lead to groupthink and tunnel vision. Internal teams can often have so much product knowledge and history, they are too close to the brand. This often makes it harder to recognise the most important or differentiating factors their business can offer.
An external agency can offer you a fresh perspective on things, sparking new ideas, providing solutions to challenges and strategies to move forward.
Specialist boutique agencies will be working with other companies within your industry, so they have a good sense for what has been done before and what is new, exciting and really engages with your customer base.
An expanded network
Working with an external marketing agency will give your business access to an expanded network of contacts. Resourceful agencies will have access to pools of talent through contacts, freelancers and their wider networks.
Agencies will be able to profile and build a network of key opinion leaders and influencers for your industry by using their network of connections. Adopting an agnostic approach to collect voice of customer by utilising an external 3rd party marketing agency will afford you more open and honest customer insights and feedback.
Using a specialist marketing agency, such as Polymorphic Marketing, you will not only gain access to new contacts within the life sciences sector but also valuable vendor relationships and recommendations with supporting businesses.
Cost efficiency
For smaller companies and start-ups using an external marketing agency is a more cost effective approach than trying to hire a complete in-house marketing team. The same can be true for larger companies that are trying to add extra resource to their in-house team.
Utilising an external marketing agency allows you to be flexible and scale your marketing activities up or down depending on new product launches, trade show seasonality, existing staff cover or for other reasons. With an internal team, there may be costs to hire and train in order to scale up, or you may need to layoff staff to scale down.
Boutique agencies like Polymorphic Marketing aim to be budget friendly, offering flexibility of services based on your business requirements and your available marketing budget.
Increased productivity
Within any company it’s very difficult to balance being creative with the need to track and review your marketing data, whilst also trying to cover off those day to day business needs and issues. It’s a real challenge, and resource can often be overstretched. The increase in support from an external agency will allow you to step up your marketing activities with an increase in quality targeted collateral output.
There are some activities such as social media marketing that require a lot of attention in order to have a notable impact. By hiring an external agency to execute these tasks, you will be elevating the burden or distraction it can cause to your current employees, allowing them to focus on their current roles.
Hiring a marketing agency will provide you with new dynamics that should kick start new ideas and inspiration, providing fresh opportunities for your business.