Digital marketing is an essential component of every business in Florida. It boosts your visibility and allows you to create your firm as an authority brand. Your website, blog, social networks, local listing, email newsletters, mentions on recognized industry blogs, and customer ratings on company review websites demonstrate your trustworthiness and inspire trust in your target market.
Who will be in charge of overseeing your online performance?
Many businesses want to keep their marketing operations in-house. Such teams are solely dedicated to you, and their only goal is to keep your consistently favorable online reputation.
However, you cannot expect one or two people to handle your whole digital marketing strategy and provide amazing results. To get the most out of digital marketing, you must hire a team of professionals, train them, and equip them with the necessary tools.
It is reasonable that many small businesses cannot afford an in-house marketing staff. They opt for alternatives such as hiring a digital marketing agency or working with freelancers.
Continue reading this article to learn about the following elements to consider for your company.
Who is a freelancer?
A freelancer is an independent marketing consultant who will most likely have some experience working for a big company in the past but will provide their services on their own. The role of a freelancer could be a virtual assistant, writer, marketing consultant, strategist, or email marketer.
What is a digital agency?
A digital agency is an established company with regular specialists or professionals that carry out marketing activities for clients. Projects could include social media marketing, search engine optimization, video editing, email marketing, content writing, graphic design, marketing and business consulting, and much more.
Why is it better for your business to hire a digital marketing agency than freelancers?
Since this selection may have a substantial influence on your business' and brand's online growth, you will want to consider all relevant considerations. Consider the following seven measures for the most accurate depiction of agencies' and freelancers' strengths and drawbacks.
- Resources
- Skills
- Structure
- Assurance
- Communication
- Workload
- Flexibility
- Results
- Cost
1. Resources
Freelancer
Pros: Freelancers may have subscriptions to the tools and apps and equipment they use most often.
Cons: Freelancers will expect you to provide or buy others apps and tools for everything else.
Digital Marketing Agency
Pros: Agencies are investing to premium subscriptions, project management, CRM, plugins, tools, equipment and laptops, to provide better service and output.
Cons: Agency might charge you for premium tools but with lesser cost than buying it on your own.
2. Skills
Freelancer
Pros: Freelancers are usually well-rounded professionals. Most freelancers don’t start out their career on their own and have usually worked in a few companies before deciding to become a freelancer. This gives them a broader perspective when it comes to marketing and the way they look at the business world. When picking your freelancer, you can find someone who excels in providing you with your exact needs, whether it be website building, SEO, or social media. You can also pick someone with the right experience level in your specific niche.
Cons: It will be hard to find a freelancer with a broad range of focused skills, which means you might have to go looking for more than one freelancer. Explaining your vision again and working with more than one freelancer can be time-consuming.
Digital Marketing Agency
Pro: With a digital agency, you’ll get a group of experienced marketers that will likely have a huge range of skills. You won’t need to repeat your vision and they’ll all be on the same page when it comes to what works best for your business.
Con: You won’t get to pick who you work with. The digital agency allocates a marketer to your business and it will usually be picked randomly, based on the size of your business. If you are a larger business, you might get an experienced marketer. However, a smaller business will likely be paired with a marketing rookie.
3. Structure
Freelancer
Pros: As a third party, a freelancer will be able to work on your campaign from the point of view of your potential customers.
Cons: As a lone outsider, a freelancer may not be able to fully comprehend or cater to the needs of a larger company or medical facility. He might also have other commitments which can cause him to de-prioritise your business and drop the ball.
Digital Marketing Agency
Pros: As a team, or a company with an organized structure of its own, an agency is better equipped to meet the requirements of larger companies or practices, and to understand how these bigger businesses roll. Also, as a separate entity, an agency can provide an objective and candid assessment of your marketing efforts.
Cons: Businesses or companies that do have their own marketing teams might see agencies as some sort of back-up option. In reality, agencies are should be seen as a partner with the same goals as your team’s.
4. Assurance
Freelancer
Pros: The level of assurance and support that you can expect from freelance digital marketing is tied directly to the personal integrity and capabilities of the freelancer. If you’ve worked with a particular freelancer before or are sufficiently convinced of his track record and reputation, you should have no reason for not being able to rely on him.
Cons: Because he is a one-man show without back-support, an individual professional may not be able to offer larger companies or businesses the assurance that another company or agency can give.
Digital Marketing Agency
Pros: Agencies are better suited to bigger businesses that may be looking for more a structured service provider that assures them of uninterrupted servicing and access to a deeper reservoir of expertise.
Cons: As with their individual counterparts, what you know about an agency is often limited to what you see online. But again, if you’ve had access to feedback or reviews from that agency’s clients, or seen what the agency can do, then trust shouldn’t be an issue.
5. Communication
Freelancer
Pro: You have to set your expectations up front and talk about the time frame for the entire project as well as the individual goal posts along the way. Freelancers can be more flexible here and communicate with you in a more informal fashion through messaging or social media.
Con: It can be difficult to communicate with a freelancer especially because their timezone may often be different than yours.
Digital Marketing Agency
Pro: Digital agencies usually have a set way to communicate with clients. They usually assign a project manager to each client that sets up weekly or monthly calls. They may even have additional people you communicate with for larger projects.
Con: Scheduling additional calls and reports may sometimes incur additional costs. Also, agencies may often have a hands-off approach where if you don’t request regular communication you may never get the information you need.
6. WORKLOAD
Freelancer
Pros: Most freelancers only work on one client at a time, which, for you, might be just as good as having a dedicated, in-house marketing specialist.
Cons: If the freelancer you engage happens to be juggling more than one client at a time, his increased workload might affect the quality of the work he is doing for you. Should the freelancer become sick or unable to work, your marketing efforts will be put on hold.
Digital Marketing Agency
Pros: However much you increase your marketing activities, you know your agency will be able to handle it because of the entire team behind it. Marketing for your business or company continues even if someone on the team falls ill or goes on leave.
Cons: You won’t be the only client the agency is servicing, but any agency worth its salt will make sure that each of its clients is given the level of service it deserves.
7. FLEXIBILITY
Freelancer
Pros: Unencumbered by a formal structure, a freelancer is faster and more agile when it comes to meeting ad hoc marketing requirements.
Cons: Speed doesn’t always go hand in hand with quality work, and a freelancer’s agility may be compromised by the amount of work to be done.
Digital Marketing Agency
Pros: If a significant amount of work needs to be done in a relatively short time, it’s easier for an agency to provide the necessary manpower.
Cons: An agency is likely to be less nimble when it comes to response time or deliverables because of its structure and size.
8 Results
Freelancer
Pros: It’s also in the best interests of an independent contractor to get results for his client, if he wants to build up a clientele as well as his reputation.
Cons: Most freelancers have highly specialized skills, and are rarely “one-man armies”. If you hired a web designer to help you market your clinic, for instance, the odds of that designer also being well-versed in analytics are pretty slim.
Digital Marketing Agency
Pros: A good digital marketing agency is results-driven, and Digital Marketing Concepts prides itself on getting measurable results for clients such as ServiceMaster, Fabri-tech, Guardian Hurricane Protection and Skin Secrets. As a full-service agency, we provide regular analytics, call tracking, website form and SEO reports on all of our marketing campaigns, so clients know exactly what we have achieved for them.
Cons: The drawbacks of being a performance-based business affect the agency itself more than the client, in that the agency is remunerated only according to the results it is able to produce.
9. Cost
Freelancer
Pros: Engaging a freelancer might be a better option for your business or company in terms of cost efficiency if you have a very specific, interim marketing requirement. You’ll be able to save on an in-house specialist’s full-time salary, and only have to pay for whatever the freelancer does for you.
Cons: Just because they don’t work for you full time, doesn’t necessarily mean they come cheap. Good freelancers are well aware of the worth of their expertise, and are likely to factor in personal expenses.
Digital Marketing Agency
Pros: Getting an agency to take care of your marketing is also more cost efficient than hiring your own team.
Cons: Agencies are likely to be more expensive than freelancers and are generally engaged for a period of time rather than on a per-project basis. The added expense, however, may be justified by an agency’s ability to ensure service continuity and accountability.
The only issue businesses encounter while hiring digital marketing services is the high cost. However, what businesses fail to understand is that by assigning work in bulk to a digital marketing agency, they can actually save both money and time.
Instead of hiring different freelancers for specialty jobs, you can get the work done in a cost-effective manner, within a shorter time frame. Hence, investing in the quality work being delivered by Digital Marketing Concepts for business is a better alternative than hiring a freelancer.
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