Is Your Business Too Small to Hire an Advertising Agency?

Small business owners wear a lot of hats. In the beginning, that may mean handling sales, operations, customer service, bookkeeping, marketing, and whatever else needs to get done before the end of the day.

At some point, though, doing everything yourself stops being resourceful and starts becoming a constraint.

That is where the question comes up: Is my business big enough to hire an advertising agency?

The answer has much less to do with the size of your company than with what you need marketing to accomplish. A small or mid-sized business may actually benefit more from outside marketing support because it is unlikely to have an entire team of strategists, designers, media buyers, writers, developers, video producers, and digital specialists sitting down the hall.

What Does an Advertising Agency Actually Do?

An advertising agency can help a business determine what it needs to communicate, who it needs to reach, where those people can be reached, and what combination of creative work and media can move the business toward its goals.

Depending on the agency and the client, that may include:

• Branding and brand strategy
• Graphic design and creative development
• Marketing strategy and planning
• Media planning and buying
• Digital advertising and search marketing
• Website development and SEO
• Social media and content
• Video production
• Campaign measurement and reporting

The value is not simply having access to a long list of services. It is having those pieces work together instead of asking separate vendors—or separate employees—to solve isolated parts of the same business problem.

We talk more about that relationship in how a marketing agency works with a business.

1. An Agency Lets You Keep Your Attention on the Business

One of the original points in this article remains one of its strongest.

Small and mid-sized businesses rarely have unlimited people or time. When the owner or another key employee is spending hours figuring out an advertising platform, creating graphics, troubleshooting a website, researching media, or trying to understand search rankings, those hours are coming from somewhere else.

Sometimes doing the marketing yourself is absolutely appropriate. Especially early in a business, necessity may require it.

But as the company grows, the question changes from “Can I do this?” to “Is this still the best use of my time?”

Outsourcing marketing does not mean abandoning responsibility for it. You still know the business, customers, industry, and goals better than an outside agency ever could without your involvement. The agency brings marketing expertise to that knowledge, so each side can concentrate on what it does best.

2. You Do Not Have to Turn Every Employee Into a Marketer

The original article suggested training employees in SEO, growth hacking, viral marketing, and copywriting. I would approach that very differently now.

Your employees should certainly understand the brand and how their work affects the customer experience. But an employee does not need to become an SEO specialist simply because the company needs better search visibility.

Modern marketing has become increasingly specialized. Search, paid media, design, website development, analytics, social advertising, content, and video each require different knowledge and experience.

That is one reason an agency can be practical for a smaller company. Instead of asking one employee to learn six additional careers, you gain access to people who already work in those disciplines.

For example, understanding the fundamentals of SEO is useful for a business owner or marketing person. Managing the technical, content, search, and analytical work required to improve visibility is a different responsibility.

3. An Agency Can Add Capacity Without Building an Entire Department

A growing business may need significant marketing support without needing enough of any one specialty to justify hiring several full-time employees.

You may need a designer this week, a media buyer next week, a developer when the website changes, a videographer for a campaign, and strategic help throughout the year.

That is where an agency model can fit particularly well.

It gives a business access to a broader team without requiring it to build an internal department with every specialty represented.

That does not automatically make an agency cheaper than employees, nor should cost be the only factor. If your organization has enough ongoing marketing work, building internal capacity can make a tremendous amount of sense. We compare those choices more directly in Marketing Manager vs. Advertising Agency.

4. Outside Creative Perspective Can Be Valuable

There is an advantage to knowing your business intimately. There is also an advantage to occasionally having someone look at it without all the assumptions that come from seeing it every day.

An agency works across clients, industries, media, and various business challenges. That exposure can create useful cross-pollination of ideas.

The goal is not for an agency to arrive with a clever campaign pulled from somewhere else and apply it to your business. It is to use that broader experience to ask better questions, identify possibilities, and create work that belongs to you.

A good creative advertising agency should bring fresh thinking without losing sight of what is practical for the business, its audience, and its budget.

5. You Gain Experience Without Having to Learn Everything the Hard Way

An experienced agency has already launched campaigns, negotiated media deals, built websites, managed budgets, tested messages, made mistakes, solved problems, and observed how different audiences respond.

That experience does not mean the agency already knows the answer for your business.

It means it has a broader base of experience from which to begin asking the right questions.

This distinction matters. Marketing is not a template. Something that worked beautifully for another business may fail for yours because the audience, geography, brand, competition, budget, or business model is different.

The agency brings experience. You bring context. The useful answer comes from combining the two.

6. Your Marketing Can Become More Connected

This may be one of the biggest advantages for a small business.

When marketing evolves one need at a time, it can become fragmented very quickly. One company builds the website. Someone else manages social media. Another vendor sells radios. An employee makes the graphics. A freelancer runs search ads.

Each person may do perfectly good work, but nobody is necessarily responsible for making sure the pieces support one another.

A campaign should not drive traffic to a website that cannot convert it. Advertising should not communicate a promise that is completely at odds with the Brand. Search, social, traditional media, content, and customer experience should not feel like unrelated businesses.

Your online marketing, traditional advertising, branding, website, and creative work become considerably more valuable when they contribute to a single, cohesive effort.

7. An Agency Relationship Still Requires Your Involvement

Hiring an agency is not handing over the keys and disappearing.

The agency needs information from you. What is changing in the business? Which customers are most valuable? What are salespeople hearing? Which products or services need attention? What operational constraints exist? What have you already tried?

The more accurately an agency understands the business, the better its recommendations can become.

We have an entire article on the information your marketing agency needs about your company because good marketing partnerships depend on this exchange. The agency cannot provide a meaningful strategy from outside the business while being kept outside the information.

Is Your Business Too Small for an Advertising Agency?

The better question is whether your business has enough need for marketing expertise, creative capacity, media knowledge, or coordination to make outside help worthwhile.

If you need one specialized task completed, a freelancer may be exactly the right answer. If you have enough work to keep a marketing professional busy every day, an internal hire may make sense. If you need several specialties working together but cannot—or do not want to—build an entire department, an agency may be an excellent fit.

And if your immediate reaction is, “That sounds great, but can a business our size afford an agency?” that is a separate and completely reasonable question. We address it directly in Can I Afford a Marketing Agency?.

The goal is not to hire an agency because that is what growing companies are supposed to do. The goal is to make sure the business has access to the right people and expertise for where it is trying to go.

If you are trying to determine what level of marketing support makes sense for your business, let’s talk. We can help you sort out what you actually need—even if the right answer is not everything we offer.