Should You Hire a Specialist or a Full-Suite Marketing Agency?

As you are beginning to roll out your marketing strategy in 2020, there are specific instances when it might make sense to engage with a specialist agency versus a full suite marketing agency. When you work with a specialist, you are getting a lot of personal attention. You are getting right to work and engaging with a partner who is very good at what they do. There are many different facets to a marketing plan, so you want to find someone who is extremely competent, and who you also like and trust.

If you go with the full suite agency, you’re going to be getting all of these services in house. You have one point of contact and they might be working with you, your website and your copy, potentially your SEO, your pay per click, and maybe even video. 

So, why would you want to go with one or the other? 

A big deciding factor is budget. From our experience, your budget dollars will go further if you are contracting with a specialist agency. For example, if you have a $10,000 budget to create a video and are contracting out with a larger agency, you are realistically only getting about $6,000 worth of actual video work.

That other markup is going directly to pay for the agency overhead. We’re not talking about the large agencies in New York or Chicago; that’s a different conversation. If you have the budget and the money to work with a Hill Holliday, you’re going to get blown away with the quality and the service and you’re going to have one point of contact. Think about bandwidth as you’re making this decision. Do you have the bandwidth to be working with individual vendors to do your website, your SEO, and your video, or do you really want to just have one point of contact?

The third part really has to come down to how much control you want. If you are engaging with different vendors who are specialists in what they do, they’re going to spend a lot of time talking with you. You’re going to be very involved in the creative process from beginning to end. 

Whenever we have been subcontracted out to work on a Boston video production project, we lose all direct contact with the client. We have to funnel all communication through this marketing agency. The vast majority of marketing agencies do not keep a full time video production staff. So, they are subcontracting that out to somebody, and some in a given market. 

Overall, one is not better than the other and ultimately it is going to come down to budget, bandwidth, and how much creative control you want as the client working with your vendors.

To learn more, contact Skillman Video Group, video production Boston agency, at [email protected].

Hiring a Specialist verses a Marketing Agency: