Why Doing Your Own Digital Marketing is Actually Costing You Money, Not Saving It

Raise your hand if this is you: You hired not just one, but two, three or even four marketing agencies only to find yourself right back where you started. Every , you’re out of thousands of dollars and building further resentment towards marketing agencies. Well … you’re definitely not alone on this one. As a whole, agencies get a bad rap for over-promising and under-delivering.

Does this thought process sound familiar?

• Can I learn this on my own and get the same results?

• Can THIS agency drive the results the last one claimed to be able to deliver?

• Is this just a bunch of smoke and mirrors?

• Where can I put my dollars to get the greatest ROI?

• Can this agency get me past my hurdle rate?

Checklist for finding the right agency partner

How can you avoid the principal agency dilemma and find someone that is actually going to deliver results? What we’ve seen at MavenXmedia is that there is, in fact, a checklist of things you must go through as you search for the right agency partner:

• Can they deliver results for my niche, and do they have testimonials to prove it?

• Is the agency willing to let you reach out to past clients, so you can hear what they have to say about them?

• How many employees do they have?

  • This will tell you the depth of resources that they have at their disposal. It’s not a leading indicator of quality or results, but if you are an enterprise, you are going to need someone that has nearly unlimited resources for adapting to you.

• What are the two to three services they specialize in?

  • Every agency under 15-20 people is going to specialize in only two to three services, despite what they might say on their website or sales pitch. They just don’t have the man power to deliver over-the-top results for more than that — nor do they have the size to attract top talent to really hammer home those results.

  • If they claim to be masters of five services at that level, dig deeper to find what they actually specialize in.

The most important question of all: What is the highest and best use of my time as an entrepreneur?

Say you need heart surgery. Are you going to be visiting a pediatrician? Or perhaps a general practitioner? Of course not!You’re going to be Googling the best heart surgeon you can find. Why? Because they have specialized knowledge in delivery damn-near perfection in what they do.

The same goes for a marketing agency or any other operations role that you can hire out for to free up time so that you can actually work ON growing your business. As a business owner, you start out as a jack of all trades — doing everything from marketing to operations to product management to HR and accounting. As you grow, you hire out for these roles, because there are others who are just plain better at it than you. Yup, believe it or not, you’re losing money by not hiring out for these role (opportunity cost of not using your highest value skillset).

What it really comes down to is what stage you are at in your lifecycle, what you can afford and your current skillsets. Figure out these three things, and consider the above questions to pinpoint where you should be leaning towards. This should cut down dramatically on agency turnover and most importantly, precious growth time lost.

Caveat: If you are truly marketing expert with years of experience in a certain area like Facebook ads, Google, SEO, etc., you can wait to hire these out until they start eating away too much of your time from other areas of the company.

Consider these points carefully and conservatively. Here’s to your more consistent growth and putting an end to reaching for an aspirin after firing yet another marketing agency. Cheers!