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One of the questions which we often find clients have been asking themselves is whether they should hire an agency or just use their staff to do marketing.

It’ll come as no surprise as to which side of the fence I sit on. But it might shock you to find out that I don’t think every business would benefit from agency help. Many small, local businesses can just do a little work from time to time on social media to help benefit their business. (If you’re one of those businesses, perhaps check out my book which will help you to create a social media strategy.)

Once a business gets to a certain size though, it’s forced into answering the question of whether they should hire an agency or start to build up their marketing department.

Below are a few of the reasons why we think a marketing agency is the only choice.

For a lot of businesses, the idea of paying somebody else to do something they can do for themselves is absurd. The temptation is always there to say, “We can just learn to do it.”

I’ve found myself falling into the same trap in the past.

When I first started The Go! Agency, I thought I could do everything myself. Then I tried to do my tax returns.

It only took a few hours of trying before I admitted to myself that I’d be better served hiring an accountant.

It’s easy to be stubborn when it costs you money. But we often don’t consider that doing things ourselves costs money in other ways.

If I’d continued to do my tax return, I’d have had to invest so much time into it that it would have been taking me away from my other duties. Worst of all, I could have made a huge mistake.

Before you decide to do your own marketing, ask yourself how long it will it take to teach yourself and whether it will be taking away resources from elsewhere in your organization.

Plus consider whether you even want to do it. I don’t care about accounting. I’m passionate about marketing. If I’d continued to do my accounts, I would have just done a bad job. Enough to get it done, but not done perfectly.

If you’re not passionate about marketing. Why force yourself to do it? You’ll only do the bare minimum to say you’ve done it.

Employing a new member of staff is never cheap.

First, there’s the cost of hiring them, then the buying of new equipment, training costs and I haven’t even mentioned their salary yet. On top of that, there is healthcare and benefits to consider.

When you work it out, an agency can actually be cheaper than employing more staff. All you need to worry about is paying the agency each month, and they do all the hard work. There are no hidden costs, and somebody else takes on the brunt of the finances.

So you’ve decided to do your marketing anyway. You’ve bought Marketing For Dummies, signed up to some online courses and subscribed to a few marketing blogs. It’s just a matter of time before you’re a marketing master.

Maybe you’ve even gone one step better, and you’ve hired some new staff to do your marketing for you. They already have the skills to make you a success. It should be easy to get started, right?

The downside to both of these scenarios is that getting started takes a while. It takes some time to employ staff and train them.

Teaching yourself marketing could take years, and in that time you’d have to make multiple mistakes to get to a point where you know what you’re doing. Mistakes that could cost your company customers.

Taking on new staff is great, especially if they have skills. But then, they still need to be trained by your business. Shown how to use your systems, worked with to understand your brand. It takes time, and if you only employ one member of staff, they’re guaranteed to be overworked.

An agency has a pool of resources.

Here at The Go! Agency we have Copywriters, Marketing Assistants, Social Media Managers, and Executives. We are experienced in a huge list of marketing practices: email marketing, PPC, Facebook Ads, social media, website dev, SEO, analytics, metrics, market research, audience creation, content marketing and graphic design. The list goes on and on.

Everybody knows what they’re doing and our systems are already in place to bring on clients and get their marketing started immediately.

Rather than in three months time.