At some point, most businesses consider hiring a marketing agency for a number of reasons. In full disclosure, we’re a marketing agency and generally in favour of people hiring us! No surprise there but let’s talk about the big benefits of hiring one.
First let me explain. We take inspiration from a lot of different places and I recently finished reading this book. The book was ‘Think and Grow Rich’ by Napoleon Hill.
Hill mentions and talks about ‘master mind’ groups throughout the book, over and over again and I guess he does this to drive home its importance. It got me thinking about why businesses really should outsource to a marketing agency. Here goes…
Sixth sense
Our name often gets mistaken for the sixth sense, I don’t mind as it’s rather apt. You’ve probably heard of this, it’s how you describe flashes, sudden inspirations or hunches that you get. Often when clients are walking through their ideal customer persona with us or they are talking about a current challenge or their goals, it’s through this process that we can tap into the sixth sense and together we get ideas, inspiration or a burst of energy.
Napoleon talks about having an imaginary meeting with nine people he called his ‘invisible counsellors’. He would set up this meeting every night to discuss and get guidance. You don’t need to imagine, an outsourced marketing agency can give you a different perspective. Plus you can take advantage of the experience we have working with dozens and dozens of other businesses in other sectors.
Master Mind
We’ve always believed and hoped that although we create brands and websites for clients, through our discovery and process that we deliver a lot more than that. We’ve often identified ways of streamlining operations, finding a new revenue streams or helping clients identify their ideal target audience so they can ultimately grow. It’s these intangible potentialities that are available to you with the power of a ‘master mind’. And it’s something you’d not have if trying to do everything on your own or in-house. The economic feature of this master mind principle was first talked about by Andrew Carnegie.
Mr Carnegie had a master mind of 50 men and attributed his success in the manufacturing and marketing of steel to this group.
Specialised knowledge
Knowledge is potential power. Taking massive action and putting into place definite plans is essential. We always talk about combining your knowledge of your business with our skills and experience to create and achieve something great together.
Whilst you’re in the weeds of your day to day business, we are free to use creative imagination to solve problems, create solutions and come up with ideas. It’s ok if you shoot them down, they won’t all be right but the philosophy is that once ideas start flowing they keep flowing… outside looking in is a great opportunity to look at things differently.
Objectivity
We all get stuck in analysis paralysis from time to time and do things because ‘we’ve always done them that way’. Sometimes critical objectivity comes from an outsider, someone who can look at things more objectively. We pride ourselves on challenging briefs or challenging ideas to make sure that what is created will add value.
Close friends, relatives and sometimes colleagues often don’t mean to handicap us through their opinions but they do. A professional marketing agency can give you an edge, a viewpoint that you’ve not seen before to make informed decisions with facts.
In summary, the key benefits of hiring a marketing agency
- It leaves you to do what you do best
- Outside looking in perspective (which you’d pay ‘consultants’ a lot of money for)
- Scale up or down easily without hiring and training new staff
- It could be cheaper than hiring in-house too as you won’t have to worry about payroll, pensions, holiday pay
- Bundles of skills at your disposal from writing, graphic design, developers, SEO, social media
In our experience, we’ve found that many bigger businesses have a marketing manager who plans out the strategy and leans on an agency for execution and implementation. Companies who invest in marketing, grow.
Don’t take it all from us though! This is what one of our clients Rod Hepper, Marketing and Communications manager at Elliott, had to say about working with us
At the outset of developing our new website with Sixth Story it was evident they had a lot of knowledge and experience to create a modern website and present Elliott as a market leader. Throughout the development they were easy to work with and had lots of fresh ideas and it was great for us to work so closely with them on a daily basis.