Should Your Startup Outsource Its Marketing to an Agency?
Dear startups: Here’s why hiring a marketing agency might not be a great idea. And how to get it right.
We’ve already talked about how hard it is for startup founders to hire the right marketing leader.
If hiring marketing talent is so hard, can’t you just hire an agency?
No. No, you can’t. I’m here to dispel all of the misconceptions I can hear you thinking. Right. Now.
Agencies will probably not save you money.
Hiring an agency to do all of your marketing will not cost less than hiring at least someone to do at least some of your marketing in-house. Some agencies tell me they’re 4x what it would cost to just hire in-house.
There are a lot of reasons for this. Here are two. Not having done the work yourself, you understandably can’t calculate all the time and tasks involved. And, there’s more back and forth, more revisions to be done, when you have a marketing agency being managed by someone who doesn’t do marketing. You just speak different languages.
If you don’t have in-house marketing staff, agencies will probably not save you time.
Fully outsourcing your marketing can actually require more of a CEO’s time (or the COO or CRO) than it would have to hire an employee who will be ready to own the marketing in-house, and have some skin in the game (ugh, I hate that term, too, someone find me something better).
You will quickly find that your agency is yet another thing for you to manage. They will not work on autopilot. They need you to partner with them. Especially if you’re in the haven’t covered #3 below.
Agencies can’t work for you until you’ve done some of the work yourself.
Your brand vision and growth vision have to be in place before an agency can implement and scale your marketing.
Decisions about what marketing you do, how it works, who it’s for, and what it says, are all laid out in a brand story + ideal customer profiles.
Without those, your agency is flying blind, throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. This will be costly and frustrating. And what sticks might churn.
The people who know best how to select, work with, and oversee marketing agencies are…marketers.
Agencies will tell you this very same thing. If they’re honest. And not just trying to get in your business. (The agency owners who’ve confirmed this shall remain nameless, should they be ostracized forever like magicians who reveal the secrets of people’s favorite tricks.)
And, by the way, we’ve already talked about how hard it is for startup founders (who aren’t marketers) to hire the right marketing leader. Why would hiring an agency, with a stellar sales pitch, be any easier, if you’re not a marketer?
Most Agencies aren’t really built to be outsourced marketing departments. they’re built to be an extension of your marketing staff.
At a big, enterprise company, your days are eaten up by meetings and email. You need an agency for execution while you stay deep in the weeds of what the company needs.
You need an agency to come in and take the crazy new creative direction that your in-house executives would not green light from the team who’s there for the day-to-day.
Or you need an agency to handle the huge, creative campaigns you can’t take on in addition to the day-to-day. In that setting, the agency is very much an extension of the in-house team, which could be quite large.
At a small startup, you can’t hire everyone you need. You can’t even do everything you know you need to do. (Prioritize. Growth stacking > growth hacking.) So you do need to rely on agencies to scale. But there’s a way to do it right…
Rather than hiring an agency to do it all, especially in startups, marketing agencies work best when:
You have someone in-house to execute on the endless tasks, and you’re leaning on the agency or fractional CMO for big strategic direction.
This way, you’re not getting billed an inflated hourly rate for things that your in-house staff could’ve done. But you have someone more senior than you’re ready to hire right now providing the overall strategy and vision.
And, bonus, the less-experienced staff get to learn from a more experienced marketing pro, which might keep them on longer.
You have someone in-house for big brand vision and strategic direction, and you’re leaning on the agency for execution at scale.
It’s far easier to establish the brand vision when you’re in the team, you’re working closely with the CEO, and you’re thinking about this brand 100% of the time than it is when you’re outside — and thinking about several brands at once, all the time.
(Yes, this is the way I recommend most startups go.)
You have some marketing staff in-house, and you’re leaning on the agency for very specific expertise and execution.
Maybe your in-house team is on point with brand vision, marketing strategy, and blog posts. But to scale, you need Facebook ads, paid search, and more hubspot tasks than anyone ever has time for (these are random examples — not everyone needs these exact things).
And sometimes it can work to outsource long-form copy like blogs or reports, but only when the outside talent can believably get down your voice and values — because they’re selected and overseen by a brand strategist. And they have a good enough process that you don’t go through five rounds of revisions to get one publishable blog post.
Wait, but all of those examples include in-house marketing talent. What if you’re super early and you can’t hire marketing talent yet?
There are things you need in order to do business at all. You need a visual brand. You need a website (a real one, not a placeholder). You need a blog. You need email. You need chat. And a whole bunch of other stuff.
An agency can do those things for you — if you can’t do them yourself. Eventually, you can pull in the right marketing talent to take it all to the next level when you’re ready.
How do you hire the right marketing agency and set them up for success?
In order of importance, here’s what you, my dear startup founder, need to do to be successful with a marketing agency. Interestingly, a lot of these overlap with hiring a recruiting agency to source your marketing talent.
(These points are proven by my favorite agency owners — and my own experience hiring agencies, some great and some that were not the right thing at the right time.)
Know who you are.
Your agency can execute on your marketing when you’re clear on what you’re marketing. That means a very clear brand story + ideal customer profiles. And if it’s only in your CEO’s head, it doesn’t count. It has to be written down, for everyone to be reading off the same script, and in words that you would actually use in public-facing stuff (there is no place in this world for internal-only brand stories).
First, hire a capable marketing professional in-house to build your brand strategy and buyer personas. Or, hire a fractional CMO who has a solid process for building a brand story. (Hi, hello, this is a thing that I’ve done. I have limited space for brand projects, but I love doing them. Let’s talk.)
(Or, someone like these guys can build and launch your brand. You’ll still need someone to do your marketing on an ongoing basis.)
Once you have your brand vision, you can hire someone to actually do marketing.
Be patient.
A good agency is going to test, iterate, and find what works. You have to be patient and let them do it. And, you have to know when enough is enough and they’re just burning through your cash.
If they’re testing different tactics and messaging, that means they’re not just trying to run the same playbook for every client, willing to lose the ones who don’t get results from that approach.
But…this can only go on for so long. At some point, if you haven’t gotten results, you have to cut them loose. It’s hard to know when that point is, if you’re not an experienced marketing professional…so I politely point you back to those notes above about how agencies work best when they have marketing talent in-house to partner with them.
Know what problem you’re hiring them to solve.
When you’re solving for the wrong problem, you hire for the wrong skills.
Let’s say, without a marketing leader in house, you decide you need content marketing to bring in more leads. But the reality is that your sales structure isn’t ready to turn those leads into revenue.
No amount of content marketing will fix a broken sales team. So you’ll spend a bunch of time and money on content marketing that doesn’t turn into revenue. Then you’ll kill the content marketing because it doesn’t seem to work. And you’ll start over with a new approach. But what you need is both an effective sales team and an effective marketing engine.
Even something as seemingly simple as broken CTA buttons can turn into wrong assumptions and a huge marketing mismatch.
Let’s say you have broken links in high-value places, so only the most determined leads actually make it through to sales. There’s now this false assumption that your close rate is really high and you just need more leads. But that’s not true at all, which you’ll learn when the agency seems to be doing everything right and you have traffic but you’re not flooded with leads. You solved — and hired — for the wrong problem.
Know what needs to be fixed in your customer experience.
Are you trying to hire an agency to solve what’s really a product problem, a product-market fit problem, or something broken in the customer journey? Or, and this is really not going to work, you’re trying to fill the top of the pipeline to compensate for high churn?
Marketing can help a good thing grow. It can’t fix a broken business.
Hire for the right thing, at the right time.
If you’re a CEO, don’t hire that agency alone. Do it in partnership with your marketing talent. You hired smart marketers to handle what they can. Talk to them about what’s needed and who’s best to fill those gaps.
If you’re a CMO or VP, be careful not to hire an agency too soon after taking on a new role. Yes, there’s a lot to do. But don’t start hiring to do it before really knowing what’s needed or having built up enough trust to be able to allocate resources as needed, long term. (That ties back to the whole being patient enough to wait for results.)
With all of these nuances, how’s a startup founder to decide what marketing talent to hire, and when?
I’m talking to founders about how they’re struggling with this or solving for it. And I’m exploring a potential side hustle that could solve it for you.
I can help you figure out who to hire, how to attract the right talent with the right job description, and how to be sure your new marketing exec. is set up to succeed from day one.
Want to my help? Contact me to talk about options & pricing for solving your marketing talent needs.