Episode 2: Are Marketing Agencies Worth It?

00:32
Madison Riddell:
Welcome to episode two of Marketing Moves. Today's topic is a hot one - are marketing agencies worth it? I'm Madison Riddell, CRO of VividFront, a full service digital marketing agency based out of Cleveland, Ohio. And with me is Lisa Perry, COO of VividFront, who hosted our last episode about influencer marketing. Go check it out if you haven't already. Obviously, on the topic of are marketing agencies is worth it, we're a little bit biased, but we do have a unique perspective to share here. As part of a marketing agency ourselves, but also as two leaders who are ultimately responsible for ensuring our growing business is profitable and scaling efficiently. We understand the importance of prioritizing profit and how carefully you must consider any drags on your bottom line. But we also know what it takes to bring on a marketing agency the right way. So that's what we're going to get into today.

01:26
Madison Riddell:
And with that, let's get into it.

01:28
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
So the million dollar question: are marketing agencies worth it? There's no arguing marketing is a or maybe even the critical business function for growth. Whether you're a mature global brand or an early stage startup, identifying how you go to market to capture new customers is the complex challenge that stands between you and success. When allocating budgets planning your p l, there's often a chicken versus egg discussion. And I know you've heard it, Madison, as CRO and sales clients are often asking you this question, so, what is it?

02:05
Madison Riddell:
I think it's a debate of do we, as a brand, invest in marketing to grow long term? Do we start that now, knowing that it'll pay dividends in the future if done the right way? Or do we save money on marketing costs today, right now, to protect short term profits? I think it's difficult for our current clients, prospective clients, to decide when's the right time, because it's hard to find success without investing in marketing. But if you haven't achieved some level of success already, where's that revenue coming from to invest back into the business, right?

02:38
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
And if you've already reached a certain level of success without a significant investment in marketing, the question is even more difficult to answer. It boils down to are you willing to introduce new expenses that may not yield an immediate return? As our audience viewers contemplate these money decisions, you're also going to have to contemplate the people decisions. I e who's going to run the marketing initiatives? You have pretty much two options. One, expand a team internally or two.

03:09
Madison Riddell:
Outsource answering that question as a growing business, am I going to grow an in house team or am I going to bring in somebody from the outside? Let's unpack that a little bit deeper. First, we can start with what does a digital marketing agency do versus an in house team at its core? Super? Simply put, a marketing agency like any other service industry, someone who works on your house, someone who works on your car going to a restaurant. It's outsourced labor and expertise. So it's getting the same squeeze from the juice, squeeze from the fruit juice from the squeeze to get those results without bringing in that in house labor depending on your needs. We'll get into this a little bit more later. Lisa is going to talk about the Ops perspective on all of this. But you might be paying somewhere between fifty K all the way up to 500K in retainer fees with an agency paying for that outsourced labor.

04:05
Madison Riddell:
So why not hire a seasoned employee, you might be thinking, or a few entry level employees for the same cost? We want to really unpack the layers to this and answer those questions so you can make a really educated decision on what makes more sense for your business. So if we kind of go through the key things that we've outlined in preparation for this episode on what we think is the advantage of going the marketing agency route versus in house? First, is more manpower the same money that's going to get you three in house employees at market rate salaries can likely get you access to a team ten x 20 x to size for most small to medium sized agencies, right? Lisa is going to get into this a little bit more later. She's going to share some perspectives on what those market salaries might look like so that you can make a good comparison.

04:54
Madison Riddell:
Second to that, we have better technology, which is a huge focus for us at our agency VividFront being on the cutting edge of leading technologies in the digital marketing and web development space. So why does an agency have better technology than what you might have access to in house buying? Access to marketing platforms, whether it's platforms to optimize your advertising campaigns, maybe it's reporting platforms, emerging technologies, even getting access to support reps. If you're running Google Ads campaigns and you want to reach out to a Google Ads rep to get some tips for how to optimize your campaigns further, access to all those different things can be extremely costly. We're talking four to five figures per month, even more depending on what you're spending across these platforms. So when you're working with an agency, you can get access to that typically without paying for this at all.

05:50
Madison Riddell:
No cost to you. Depending on the agency you're working with, some things might float to you as a super low monthly cost. A couple of dollars a month here or there to pass through that expense over to your business, but certainly not four to five figures per month. So you're getting access to the same tools that benefits the agency side that's responsible for your campaigns, but also benefits your side of the house as well. Any thoughts on better technology from the client's perspective?

06:15
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
Well, I think some clients might be thinking, or businesses might be thinking, what about the free tools? There's Google Analytics for free. I can get MailChimp to send my emails for a very low cost. I can use Google search console. So really they have to remember you get what you pay for. The best software and services end up costing more and they give you more data, they're easier to use, they'll give you better reports, so you get what you pay for.

06:44
Madison Riddell:
And I think on the you get what you pay for topic, yielding to better results. The platforms know this too. So certain Google products, for example, like Search Ads 360, CM 360, either now are today or evolving to this place where they're only selling agency licenses. So even if you wanted to ask somebody on the brand side, you can't even pay to play and get access to these platforms. So it's only going to get a lot of minimums. Yeah, more involved in that space for sure, in addition to more manpower, better technology. I think probably the biggest reason that somebody considers working with a marketing agency in the first place is this concept of constant evolution. So depending what kind of agency you're working with, there's all different shapes and sizes. You have super niche firms that are really specialized, that are just a paid search shop or just a design shop.

07:37
Madison Riddell:
Our agency, and what we're going to reference a lot throughout the episode is a full service agency, which means that we have many different services and capabilities all under one roof. It's kind of a one stop shop. So when you're working with a full service agency like ours, they're serving a ton of other clients. And I think you and I have both heard throughout many years of client services that's a pain point. I don't want to work with somebody that's working with other clients. What if there's a bigger client with a bigger budget that you're prioritizing over me and my business? That's a logical thought. Our flip side perspective on that is if you're working with tons of other brands, you bring the learning lessons and the perspectives from all those other brands as well. I know that you agree. I think also you can run into agencies that aren't niched out by service.

08:32
Madison Riddell:
So maybe they're a full service agency like us. They're not just focused on one channel or one type of marketing, but they're niched out by industry. And I think that's more common. You have a lot of marketing firms that are focused on just B to B brands versus B to C. Just engineering, just retail, pretty much any type of niche or industry model you can find in the marketing space. But again, if you're working with an agency that is touching many different industries, you might think, why does your other engineering client matter to me if I am a retail business? But we often find lessons learned across these industries that you would think have no connections that can benefit the client in the long run.

09:13
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
Right. It's all about perspective. If you are having tunnel vision on your brand and in your industry, you're going to miss opportunities to be creative.

09:22
Madison Riddell:
Exactly. And that's a good hot take from this episode is the whole reason people bring on agencies in the first place or any sort of outsourced expertise is because of the experts, because they have more perspective, because they're laser focused on this day in and day out. So that's the pitch. End of episode.

09:42
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
I know you have more, tons more.

09:45
Madison Riddell:
Next up, I think is an important topic, again, that I think Lisa can weigh in on a lot from an operations perspective, which is less overhead for your business. And again, it's easy to see marketing agency costs immediate drag on the profitability of the business. On your bottom line, you have to pay for the marketing agency's execution on top of what you're paying to platforms for media advertising. But we're talking about a different type of overhead here, which is talent overhead. When you're outsourcing to a firm, you don't have any of that. Want to unpack that a little bit?

10:17
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
Yes, I would love to. It drives me crazy to this day when I hear my clients say, oh, agencies are so expensive, or you guys are so expensive, or it's a prospective lead that's saying, well, we just can't afford it, let's break it down. Because from my perspective, and I'm interested in any other thoughts from the outside world, please comment. Reach out. But after doing this for ten years, let's take the cost of a typical marketing team that is able to come together and produce a significant growth driven marketing campaign for a business over the course of a year. So I want to take some numbers of what those team members and that talent might cost. Let's take it very conservatively, like the talent market in a place that has a low cost of living, like here in Cleveland. And I'm going to throw out minimums again to be conservative.

11:17
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
So you're going to need a graphic designer, somebody that knows how to make things pretty online, move the pixels around, match your brand, ideally one that can incorporate movement into designs rather than just static posts. You're looking at least $50,000 a year, annual salary for a good one. Then you need a media buyer so that's somebody that can run ads profitably and report on KPIs across multiple channels. They need to know how to use the tools. It's very confusing in there. Even if they say they're certified, they might not be. Media buyer skill set, especially here in Cleveland, is hard to come by. You're looking at least $65,000 a year in annual salary. And these are just salaries, haven't even gotten into benefits you probably need for any type sized business, a brand manager, content marketer. So it could take on either of those titles.

12:06
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
But really what it is someone dedicated to handling all of your owned media. So all of your social media accounts, your blog or email newsletters. So you're looking at least another $50 to $55,000 a year because this person needs to be able to write and translate messages across many different mediums while also staying on brand.

12:27
Madison Riddell:
And pause you right there. We've had, even at our own agency, a challenge finding people who can write.

12:33
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
It's weird, isn't it?

12:34
Madison Riddell:
It's so hard. Yeah, it's been one of our biggest hiring challenges is finding people who can actually do this work and do it well.

12:42
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
Long form and short term writing, it's a different skill set.

12:45
Madison Riddell:
Sometimes it's hard to find and sometimes you can find it in freelancers again, but it's outsourced labor. So if we're talking about bringing in house, good luck finding them because it's hard for us to find them too.

12:54
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
Or if you're a writer out there, reach out to us. We'd love to meet you. You're going to need somebody to oversee all of these people. So I'll call it a director of marketing, somebody that is executive excuse me, level enough to be able to manage other employees. Bring a group of people together toward a common goal, track and measure their success, some sort of managerial position. It's going to be difficult to find somebody at that level of expertise for less than six figures. So for a director of marketing, assume conservatively $100,000 a year and then overhead. Because if you're bringing on two employees, your business is probably offering some sort of benefit package. So assume ten K in benefits for each of the four full time employees that we just walked through. Ours is closer to 18 to 20K in benefits. But let's just assume, conservatively ten in benefits for each of those employees.

13:51
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
That's another $40,000 a year. Not even talking about parking or additional perks snacks, nothing like that. Then you maybe need some more budget for occasional ad hoc needs that don't warrant a full time W two employee. Like your website hosting, website maintenance, your CRM system support, video work, photography work, maybe some branding work once or twice a year. Public relations, keeping up with your search engine optimization. Let's call all of that to outsource on an ad hoc basis. Whether you're finding somebody on fiver, looking for somebody on all of the million freelance platforms that are available to you, conservatively $1,000 a month, $3,000 a quarter, or $12,000 a year, that is totaling around $322,000 a year for an in house marketing team that can run a marketing program for your business. That averages out to be around $27,000 a month. VividFront's average monthly agency retainer is $15,000 a month.

15:02
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
That's nearly half of the cost that you'd pay for the in house team for all those above scales. Plus, you get the advantage of working with professionals that literally have no choice but to be on the cutting edge of best practices for performance, which you haven't mentioned yet in your list. I think you're touching on it next. But if someone's working for an agency and a team, they have to be on the cutting edge of technology and performance, or they literally will not get rehired by the client, right? And they won't have a job. Not to mention, entry to mid level talent in digital marketing is so difficult to attract and retain. So how will you know if you don't know how to do the skill yourself? If you're vetting your in house team correctly as you hire, how will you fairly motivate them without burning them out?

15:46
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
How will you ensure they have all the right tools and software? We talked about how some of these platforms can run $6,000. Another cost would even factor into this.

15:59
Madison Riddell:
Example, and that's the Tea sounds super expensive. And again, when you look at it on paper, it starts to make more and more sense, which I think is an exercise that businesses should do when they're making these decisions. And we're going to round out the episode towards the end of this with some questions that you can ask yourself, some really simple questions to figure out whether or not you're ready for this level of investment or whether or not you're ready to bring on an outsourced team. But kind of a spoiler alert to that is everything that Lisa said is the comparison of an orange to an apple of in house first outsource. And we our sweet spot with clients is a mixture of both. We can talk about that a little bit, too, but you shouldn't replace one wholesale for the other. So I think it's about finding a balance.

16:51
Madison Riddell:
It's about picking the right agency that's going to serve the gaps that you have internally, but you don't want to be completely outsourcing. This critical function of your business, right where we started the episode, critical function of your business is marketing. You have to be doing it. If you're not doing it, you're not selling your products, you're not selling your services. So if you're going to be bringing on an agency, you need at least one of these people, probably two of these people that Lisa mentioned, depending on the size of your business, that's going to be managing what this looks like on an ongoing basis. So as you think about these costs, if you really want to break this down, if you want to spreadsheet it out, pull those numbers. Lisa mentioned. Keep that in mind. Too I think.

17:29
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
So.

17:29
Madison Riddell:
Certainly less overhead, less benefits, less salaries. Something that you touched on slightly that we can unpack a little bit more too is training overhead. So you have that director of marketing, they have a six figure salary. They're managing these team members, and they're responsible for making sure that their team has the aptitude to manage campaigns, is staying on the cutting edge. So there's a component to their own learning and development to make sure they're staying on the cutting edge. And that has to trickle down to the rest of the team. So our experience is doing that on the agency side. But we have heard from many of our clients, still hear from our clients all the time. They brought us on because they have an in house resource that it's spread super thin. They're wearing lots of hats, whether they're at the director level or they're more entry level, and they don't have the time to slow down and learn in this space to stay up to date, let alone train somebody else how to do it right.

18:26
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
You can't underestimate how long it takes to correctly train employees. It's a difficult task. It needs focus and energy. We have full time roles here that are baked into our overhead as an agency that spend time with individuals on a one one basis multiple times.

18:44
Madison Riddell:
Per month, not to mention the cost of, for example's, sake, it takes 90 days to ramp an employee to get them fully trained on your business, which is quick. But for example sake, 90 days. When it doesn't work out after 90 days like it does, not every hire works out. We know this. The opportunity cost lost on spending that time training for somebody who doesn't work out or leaves is huge. And even if they do work out past that 90 day period, they stay a year or two. Marketing industry across the board, whether you're in house or agency, is notorious for high turnover. It's something we focus on a lot internally. That's another challenge that you might be weighing in house versus outsource. But even if you train this resource the right way, even if you bring them on and they're a fantastic fit, the shelf life on a standard marketing employee is what, one to two years on average, right?

19:34
Madison Riddell:
Yeah. So leave that job to somebody else. Leave it to the agency to offer the good benefits, to offer the good salary, to train and retain the team. You don't want that on your plate yet. Better things to do, like reducing risk. Yes. Next up, an important benefit not to be overlooked is less risk. So you don't have to be a lawyer to figure out what this looks like. Not every relationship pans out, like I just mentioned. Not every employee pans out. Not every agency is going to be the right fit. So depending on your agency service level agreements, the SLAs. You can usually fire them at any time with a 30 day notice, 60 day notice. Some clients, you can terminate them right on the spot, and they'll stop work. So if you bring on an agency, similar circumstance, you test them out for a few months, it doesn't work out.

20:27
Madison Riddell:
You're not seeing the results you were hoping for. You're not getting that return on investment. There's typically far less strings attached to get rid of them wholesale. I think unpacking, that even more what it means to a business owner or somebody who's leading a business, small or large. When you terminate an employee, a lot can happen. We can go from, first, the worst side of things, they sue you for wrongful termination or something worse. Right. There's a legal implication to firing somebody for not doing the right reasons, not documenting it, whatever. There's the terrible side of firing somebody, letting them go or them quitting. They go bash you on glassdoor or whatever. Tons of things that can happen externally or from a legal perspective. But even on the less dramatic side, there's just this impact on internal culture. When you let somebody go or when they leave, it's just never good for the business.

21:20
Madison Riddell:
So if you can limit that risk from a legal standpoint or just from putting your culture on the line, perspective, outsourcing functions like these or supplementing the in house team with an outsourced team can reduce that risk if it doesn't work out.

21:34
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
Yeah. And I know you mentioned that we at VividFront focus on SMBs. I think SMBs is the perfect size company to consider an agency. If you are too large, good for you. Fortune 500, Fortune 1000. This advice might not make as much sense to you, but if you're an SMB. That's really trying to scale based on everything that Madison just said and the salaries that I rattled off, you probably are going to need. To invest in somebody to sit in that talent recruitment seat, too, and make sure that when there's turnover, that they're out there finding somebody to replace that seat. And if you are a smaller organization with a smaller marketing team, you might not have the budget to invest in another person. Right. That's another w two employee to protect that turnover, and agencies bake that in and they have that role.

22:29
Madison Riddell:
Exactly. Yes. And two, on the less risk side, wrapping this one up.

22:36
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
So cool.

22:37
Madison Riddell:
You want to fire an agency, it's not working out. Definitely lower risks than terminating an employee. But also on the flip side of that, it's peak holiday season or you get a huge investor in your business or something, booms. You have a great influencer partnership, and your sales are skyrocketing. How quickly can you bring on that person that you need with extra hands to facilitate that surge? In business, like especially in Ecommerce, a lot of they're completely locked in a corner because they have all this opportunity banging on their door. We want to buy your products, and they don't have the inventory, or they don't have the customer service team or whatever, but they also don't have the marketing person. So if you don't have to worry about bringing on somebody new, and you can call up your agency the same day and be like, hey, I want to double my retainer, does that sound good to you?

23:29
Madison Riddell:
I'm sure your agency wouldn't say no. I'm sure they have the capacity or a way to figure it out, and you can take that money and go hire another person to ship orders so that you can meet this new demand.

23:38
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
Exactly.

23:40
Madison Riddell:
Cool. So, so far, just to give us an update here, what does a digital marketing agency do versus an in-house team? Why is it better? What are the pros? At least if you're not convinced, it's better. You got more manpower, better technology. These brands are constantly evolving. They're making sure they're at the top of their game. You have less overhead, less risk. Last one I want to round out with, which, depending on your role in an organization, this might speak to you more than anything else. I know it does. To me, we all know time is money. It's less time, less of your precious time wasted, or maybe not wasted, but spent in the trenches, executing campaigns. If you hire somebody on the outside, you can let your internal team focus on other parts of the business or remain focused on marketing, but focus on the right things.

24:31
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
That gives you an opportunity to be more strategic.

24:33
Madison Riddell:
Totally.

24:34
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
Actually step back, look at the big picture. If you're bogged down in the trenches, that's really difficult to do.

24:39
Madison Riddell:
I also think there's two ways to look at this. You either keep the strategy in house and you let your top performing internal marketing team lead the strategy, which typically is more fulfilling the strategic component of things. And you keep that talent in house, and they lead the charge. They cascade that strategy to the marketing agency, and the marketing agency pulls the levers and executes. Or you can be on the flip side. Maybe you have a couple of entry level people you want to keep your salary costs low. You keep them in house, and they can pull the levers, but you want to outsource the strategy and expertise. Not every agency offers that model. We do at Vivid, where we offer consulting work, Lisa and I in particular, where, hey, maybe you have an in house marketing team. They're either burnt out or they don't know what's going on in the space, or they need a little bit of extra juice in the strategy.

25:30
Madison Riddell:
They outsource the strategy to us. We do a complete audit of their landscape, their competitors. We figure out their audience segments. We come up with a new plan to go to market. We teach their team about it over a ton of different meetings. We give them literature, we give them access to platforms, and then we set them free and they run it themselves. So revisiting this topic a little bit about outsourcing strategy. One thing I'll share that our CEO Andrew Spott says all the time again, and it might contradict some things, it might be different from other agencies perspectives, but it's one to think about. We exist as an agency, and we hope as an agency that puts the client first, that's completely focused on results, that you fire us. So if you're just looking for a short term fix, if you're really passionate about growing the in house team, if you're a larger business, like some of our bigger clients that are household names, and you just want that extra strategy juice for a couple of months, a couple of years, whatever, until you can grow that team internally, fire us.

26:33
Madison Riddell:
That's what we want. We want to drive such a strong strategy or drive such compelling results that the ROI is massive, the impact is massive, and you have so much extra revenue, the only thing you know what to do with is bring this marketing function in house. So we tell this to clients all the time that are like, oh, we love working with you guys, but we're starting to bring in this in house team. And we understand, we get it. That's the price to pay when you're outsourced labor and expertise. We know that, and we're eyes wide open on it.

27:04
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
So you're saying agencies are worth it if you don't yet have a go to market strategy that's scalable and scaling and proven and working.

27:14
Madison Riddell:
Yeah. Once you have that, there's so many circumstances, which is why this episode could be 3 hours long. Exactly what you just said. But also maybe you have the strategy completely perfected. It's super articulate. You have an awesome rock star in the seat internally, but you need someone to go pull the levers. It's just about that perspective. I think an agency can make sense in many different stages of a business.

27:38
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
But if you're looking at it black and white totally. You're trying to build a marketing program from the ground up, and you're trying to decide, should I build it internally first or start with an agency first? That's where those cost comparisons I was talking about come into play.

27:54
Madison Riddell:
Totally. Yes. And that comes into selecting the right agency too. Right when you're talking to an agency for the first time, or getting to know them, or interviewing agencies, depending on where your business is at, if you're in startup mode or you're revisiting your strategy, stripping things back, are you looking for an agency that has experience with working with startups and creating a vision and building something from scratch? If you're a Fortune 100 brand and you got the strategy figured out, everybody already knows who you are. But you need some lever pullers. Are you looking. For an agency that works with big brands that does the lever pulling. It's easy to find those things if you're looking in the right places. And maybe we'll do a separate blog post in the future on like 100 questions that you could be asking during this process of vetting agencies.

28:39
Madison Riddell:
But I think it's about listening to an episode like this, doing a little bit of research, really digging deep on what type of organization am I, what's my current aptitude and how so that you can start making these decisions. These are just some things to think about. These are the advantages. I think next we should get into some of the cons. Let's face those heads on why should people not hire a marketing agency? And then we can give kind of a full scale wrap up of what questions you should ask.

29:07
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
Perfect.

29:08
Madison Riddell:
Cool. So cons of an agency or pros of keeping things in house. When you keep things in house, undoubtedly you have tighter quality assurance and turnaround time. We won't refute that if you have a sale that needs to drop today. Again, depending on your agency, how accessible they are, how big they are, what their infrastructure looks like, some agencies have a minimum turnaround time of 48 hours to respond to emails. So if you can't even get in touch with your agency, that could be a concern. If you're a business that's making quick shift moves, especially in the startup space, that might be something to consider. I think on the quality assurance side, this is a little bit of a reach. External teams should have really high quality assurance too, but I think you might be able to, on the client side, on the brand side, hold people a little bit more accountable to your brand.

30:05
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
Standards or maybe get a little more buy in.

30:07
Madison Riddell:
Totally. And again, if there's an argument to be made, if your internal team is only laser focused one thing and one thing only, which is your brand's marketing, maybe they have a quicker turnaround time. Maybe they have higher quality assurance than an agency who's doing it for dozens of other brands. I think the second pro of keeping things in house would be no time overhead in managing an outsourced resource. I stand by the fact you're going to spend way less time on this stuff if you're outsourcing it, or at least you're going to be spending time in the right places. But if you do keep things in house, you shave off a little bit of that time, a little bit of compromise there on managing an outsourced resource. So like we said in the beginning, no matter what, pro tip, if you're hiring a marketing agency, please make sure you have somebody in house who understands marketing and you're not wholesale outsourcing this with no marketing expertise in house.

31:04
Madison Riddell:
But if you keep it in house, you'll save a little bit of time, you won't have to manage that resource. Third, your team knows your industry and your unique business better than anybody else. We do everything we can to interview our clients, use tools, tried and true processes to extrapolate everything we possibly can about the history of your business, what you've done to date, what you've done well, what you haven't done well. But there's nothing better than having somebody right next to you who already knows all the things and you don't have to say it out loud.

31:37
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
And an in house team probably is more intimate with the product and the customers. Totally. Yeah.

31:42
Madison Riddell:
If you're talking to that customer every day, you could answer these questions on who's my target audience far better, or what's wrong with my marketing strategy, what's wrong with my product, what customer pain points am I facing all the time? That's a good point. Next, maybe. Last but not least, I think I touched on this a little bit earlier, but again, you're not the only client. So you can get in this mentality of if there's a bigger spender with a larger budget that's paying more money to the agency, maybe I'm going to be last in line to get my service. And I think that's a justified concern. Again, I'm biased. I think our agency takes a refreshing approach to this. We treat every client the same. Easy to say, hard to walk the walk, but I think that's a valid concern for sure. So any other thoughts on cons of going the agency route?

32:36
Madison Riddell:
It's hard for us to pull these guys.

32:38
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
It's just really only pros.

32:41
Madison Riddell:
Cool. I think it really boils down to choosing the right agency that meets your needs. If you're stacking this all up in a spreadsheet that checks all the boxes.

32:52
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
And just the phase of your business, even when you were going through the cons, I'm thinking, sure, you can hire an agency for lever pooling. But once you have the strategy up and running and you know what you need, that's when it makes more sense to bring it in. House. You should probably partner with an agency to help you ramp the strategy and figure out what you need.

33:16
Madison Riddell:
Totally. Yes. So figuring out that difference, am I outsourcing strategy or am I outsourcing lever pulling is a really big discussion to have. I think there's also a component to cultural alignment. We talk about this a lot because we're full service and we're not niched out by industry. Basically, it sounds like we have no niche.

33:36
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
Right.

33:37
Madison Riddell:
We do pretty much every service and we service pretty much every industry. So for us with our agency, the things that we look for to see if we're the right fit for a client or if they're the right fit for us, one of them is that cultural alignment. Like, do you have somebody in this seat that's going to be managing us as the outsourced resource that values our expertise? Because if we're going to be coming to every meeting, every week, constantly fighting tooth and nail to prove that the campaigns are doing the right thing, to prove that we're investing in the right tactics. That's not going to be good for you guys or us in the interest of time's money. So I think the cultural alignment is really important too. I think as far as looking out for maybe red flags, more cons of agencies, another one toss in there would be black box technologies.

34:28
Madison Riddell:
That comes to mind because from a sales perspective, when we're bringing in new clients, oftentimes, I would say at least 50% of the time, keeping in mind that we have a whole separate side of the house from the marketing team, which is a web services team. Designers and developers that are creating custom websites, especially on that side of the house. Clients are constantly coming to us because, hey, I worked with this other agency in town and they put me on this proprietary CMS for my website and I can't edit it. No one can make content updates on my team. Classic I'm chained to my agency is often what we hear, and it makes them scared to work with us. You get burned by that. So I think that's something to look out for sure. If you're interviewing agencies and they're selling you on, we have this proprietary technology, the secret technology, that means that nobody else can use it, including your internal teams, including any other agency that you bring on.

35:28
Madison Riddell:
So don't buy into the proprietary sales tactic of selling you a black box. That change you to them forever. So, pro tip, another free learning lesson on behalf of our current clients. Anything else? No, I think we're cons pros.

35:45
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
Ready to wrap?

35:46
Madison Riddell:
Perfect. Ready to wrap with three questions. Get out your notepad. You have three questions to ask yourself internally. Your internal stakeholders, whether or not you're ready for an agency. First, do I know my marketing goals so I can hold the agency accountable? I know that you have some thoughts on this one, Lisa, before we wrap on what is created, if a business hires a marketing agency without knowing what the goals are to hold somebody accountable.

36:24
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
We'd have to do a whole different episode on that. We can't wrap with that.

36:28
Madison Riddell:
Yeah. The long and short of it, from my perspective, is how are you going to decide if this agency is worthy, if this agency is providing ROI, if you don't even know what you're establish some criteria, basically establish it, figure out what's the goal of bringing on this agency. Second, do I know my marketing budget or am I prepared to set one? Rolling up with no sense of cost can put yourself in a bad position. People can take advantage of that. They can oversell you on things you don't need, or you might be ill prepared to invest what it takes to actually grow from a marketing perspective. And then last but not least, like we've touched on many times, do I have that internal resource that has marketing aptitude that's going to manage and support the agency? Do I know my marketing goals? Do I know my budget?

37:16
Madison Riddell:
Do I have an internal resource? And that's everything you need to know about hiring a marketing agency once you decide that it's worth it.