Perhaps this is a question that all entrepreneurs have faced. You have your own business, you want to develop it, but you do not have enough “hands”, knowledge, time to control all the processes. After all, you are tied to everything: logistics, advertising, recruitment, legal issues, financial matters.

Perhaps this is the issue that all entrepreneurs have faced. You have your business, you want to develop it, but you do not have enough “hands”, knowledge, time to control all the processes. After all, you are tied to everything: logistics, advertising, recruitment, legal issues, financial matters. Sooner or later you reach a point where you realize that you need to scale up, get more customers, and you are ready for it. You start familiarizing yourself with the topic, go to Google and start searching for information. Already in a few hours of surfing you learn that Internet advertising is a very generalized understanding and is divided into many separate areas. There are SEO website promotion, contextual advertising, YouTube, social networks, email marketing, chat-bots, a lot of new words: end-to-end analytics, retargeting, remarketing, sales funnel and much more.

After getting a superficial look at this topic, you come to the conclusion that you don’t have time for this and need to put the matter in the hands of the experts. Again, go to Google, type in “Order Online Advertising” and the search engine displays you thousands of sites. They all have different prices, some promise the result, others say that those who promise the result – just shake the air with big words and it is impossible. After spending a few hours more time, you will realize that there are two main segments of performers: freelance and advertising agencies.

Who to work with?

This is a difficult question, especially when you yourself don’t know what you want. “I want to promote” is a very vague understanding, the lack of a clear Terms of Reference for the project is another problem for many aspiring entrepreneurs. After all, if there is no clear project documentation, then the result, as they say, will be appropriate.

The first thing that can be referred to is probably the price: the agency will always cost more, for obvious reasons: staff, brand, office, etc. Freelancing is a specialist who is somewhere in an apartment and needs only a laptop and the Internet to work. Now let’s look at all the nuances.

A freelancer is usually an “omnivorous person”: he will promote your site, set up the targeting and all sorts of recommendations, and even create a website.

The agency does all the same, but at a triple price. “Why overpay?” – You ask.

Marketing is a very fickle sphere, every day there are algorithm updates, services have new features and functionality, the official blogs of social networks and search engines unsubscribe every week to new changes in advertising tools. Active changes in these areas should be taken into account when working with your advertising campaigns in the future. 

A person who deals with everything – physically can not keep up with all the directions, and to know – is only half the battle. Another thing is to test, implement and evaluate. While such a specialist may have only 3-4 projects, moreover, in one specific area, for example, only the social networks. Hence, its competitiveness in the market, as a “combat-ready” unit, is questionable. To drive a tank you need a loader, a driver-mechanic, a gunner and, of course, a commander. Agree, it is difficult to imagine a crew where one person will do all this while remaining a danger to the enemy and accomplishing their mission.

In this respect, the agency clearly wins – it is because of this that larger companies turn to them, as they themselves understand on the basis of their business that a successful project requires specialists in specific industries. The copywriter writes high-quality text, the marketer sets up advertising, the SEO-specialist is engaged in promoting the site, the programmer writes code for the new functionality on the site, and the designer draws the graphic elements. In this case, the commander of the crew will be a project manager – who serves as the link between the client’s request and implementation of agency tasks.

I hope I’ve made my point. But let’s raise the stakes and imagine that you’ve hired several people on a freelance basis, each of whom understands a particular niche.

First, the price would likely already be close to the same agency. But that’s not the nuance. For example, you are not satisfied with one of the performers, you changed it, and the question arises – and the person who came instead, he already has a kind of “road map” of all the steps you have passed? Where is the guarantee that he won’t take the same roundabout route and start testing and implementing the tools that are clearly not working? A new freelancer might not know what audiences have already been tested before, what works worse and what works better – hence, he will step on the same rake.

Next, How much time will it take for a new freelancer? He needs to be brought up to speed, introduced to other colleagues. And if that person is sick? Who will take some of his work? Or will he just leave the project (as is often the case in freelancing). If you’re a larger company, you’ll need to renegotiate the contract, sign non-disclosure papers, make strategy plans again, adjust them with each new specialist, bring them up to speed, etc. All of this is time, and time. Plus, yours.

Working with an agency, such disparities are minimized: stories where everyone points the finger at each other and blames each other for the lack of results are normal practice for projects with several people from different parts of the world. The lack of a united front, the coordination of actions, leads to chaos, and chaos is, again, a waste of time.

At the agency, the history of all the work is most likely summarized in a single dock. For example, each project is a group of tasks in the CRM system, which stores the entire history of the specific project: reports, source banners, recommendations from experts, test results, conclusions and other information. When making any decisions, we are guided by previous experience, and these decisions are made by specialists in a particular field, which, of course, has a positive effect on the overall dynamics of the project.

I will not write the conclusion, make it yourself. Thank you for reading our blog. Subscribe to our social networks and Telegram-channel, there you will find more interesting information.

Lora