Whether you’re a private business, a non-profit organization, or a one-man shop, you have marketing needs. Creating awareness for your products and services, driving leads, and hitting sales goals can take a lot of work–sometimes more work than your internal staff capacity or expertise allows. Should you hire more staff? Or look to external resources? When needs arise, there are many benefits of working with an agency to consider.
It’s just marketing, can’t anybody do it?
Well sure, technically, yes I suppose so. After all, you don’t need a special license to practice marketing (yet… insert evil laugh here), but there’s a reason why big Fortune 500 companies don’t hire CMO’s off the street. Like most professions, experience matters in marketing. Marketing is a lot of trial and error, because no two industries or businesses are exactly the same. And typically the goal of marketing is to influence people: their thoughts, their actions, their perceptions, etc. People, unlike machines, are always changing and don’t react in the same way. The more experience you have, the easier it can be to accurately predict this behavior and devise unique strategies to get the results you want. Marketing agencies bring that experience through a team of seasoned employees working with a large number of clients across a variety of verticals.
Times they are a Changing Too
Are you still using MySpace? Are you down with the Facebook? Are you looking for an app that will let you take photos and put them on the line? (If that last one made you chuckle, let’s talk about a movie you’ll enjoy.) Here’s my point: the tools of marketing are constantly changing. The old standby’s of traditional marketing still exist for the most part (like radio, TV, billboards, etc.), but even the way we use them has changed dramatically. Many people now stream TV instead of having a service. Some prefer music services like Spotify to radio. And the world of social media and smart phones opened up a Pandora’s box of options to marketers, but even the platforms and their available features change almost weekly. As agency marketers, it’s our job to keep up with these things and to know how to make them work best to our advantage. Ain’t nobody else got time for that!
Efficiency is Key
And speaking of time… Have you ever hired a professional to do something in your home? Let’s say you want to build a deck. You may know how to nail a few boards together and own the tools to cut materials. You could even watch hours of YouTube videos for tips and how-to’s on how to build a deck. And you can get to work on evenings and weekends, chipping away at building that deck in your spare time. But how long will it end up taking you to build that deck? Will the final result be professional quality? And more importantly, will it be safe, secure, and up to all code standards? In contrast, when you hire a professional, you’re getting someone who already has all the best tools. They know the tricks of the trade, and can build it quickly and build it right. They can probably finish it in a fraction of the time, because when they schedule your job, they have a singular focus: they go only to your house and do the work, with no competing priorities. Agencies are similar. Here you’ll find specialists and experts that are masters of their domains, which saves significant time. Clients often find we’re able to complete projects for them in a fraction of the time it would take to do it themselves.
Progress Comes at a Price
A price that you either pay to someone else, or bill to yourself by way of hours of work and time lost that could have been spent on another project. Many clients come to us because they have a list of “someday” projects that never seem to get priority. Or perhaps they’ve “been meaning to accomplish X”, but it just doesn’t get done. Agencies such as Vivid Image can really serve as an extension of your own staff; filling in as needed when you’re short on time, or covering the day-to-day. We can also add a level of accountability and push–when we’re tasked with a project, we work to get it done, quickly. Best of all, unlike hiring additional internal staff, you don’t need to pay benefits to an agency, and the services can be a la carte. Use and pay for only what you need, and get the right expert, right when you need it.
If you’re ready to see how your organization could benefit from working with a partner agency like Vivid Image, give us a call. We’d be happy to discuss how we could work together to help accomplish your goals and create a customized plan.
