If you’re trying to decide between keeping your marketing in-house or outsourcing to a marketing agency, it can be helpful to understand the potential drawbacks of working with an agency. 

As you explore these, it’s important to understand that not all marketing agencies are created equal, and your organization may have different needs that are best handled by different agencies, or maybe an in-house resource.

Bad targeting

The first potential drawback of working with a marketing agency is poor targeting. In a business, target audiences can change. When this happens, your targeting needs to be updated in order to reflect the change and continue reaching the right individuals.

Going on a whim doesn’t give you the right target demographic. Conducting audience research does. The right marketing agency will conduct extensive research on who is buying your product or products similar to yours. They should help you focus on demographics and psychographics to create buyer personas.

Overall, business intelligence should be a top priority and we’ve seen that many marketing agencies just don’t treat this as such.

Slow to adapt

We’ve noticed that many marketing agencies are slow to adopt new marketing strategies. Notably, we’ve seen how impactful LinkedIn/LinkedIn videos can be for businesses, yet few marketing agencies are working to produce valuable content on the platform.

Today, LinkedIn is the number one site for businesses to market on. Yet, many people still aren’t fully optimizing it. (Are you one of those people? Our B2B LinkedIn Checklist can help you get started!)

Another commonly forgotten trend is optimizing your content on mobile. More than half of your site visitors use mobile devices to check social and other digital platforms, so why isn’t your marketing agency fully optimizing your marketing for mobile interactions? If you’ve identified that your audience is active on mobile, your marketing agency should make sure all your content is optimized for mobile viewing.

Omni-channel errors

Many marketing agencies over-promise and under-deliver. If one of your goals is to drive awareness, an agency may recommend a large-scale plan that includes many different platforms/channels… but then doesn’t follow-through on managing those platforms.

When your business is present on many platforms but is only active on a few, you’re actually harming your brand. Instead of trying and failing to maintain every single platform, you, or your marketing agency, should focus on being super successful on a few platforms.

Explore how each channel can help you reach your target audience and ensure you’re maintaining a consistent brand across all your channels. By doing this, you give your customers a more seamless journey across all channels.

Knowing your strengths and weaknesses

Are you familiar with your company’s strengths? What about your marketing agency? Too often, agencies try to do everything when it comes to marketing. As a result, your messaging becomes too generic and unfocused.

Instead, your company needs to find which parts of marketing they want to focus on, be it lead generation, content, social media, etc, and dig down there.

As part of this, it’s also critical that you know who your competitors are. A good marketing agency will do a full competitive analysis to get to know who your competitors are and how they operate in order to help you develop your strengths.

Testing

There are many agencies out there that are slow to adopt new strategies. Instead of being satisfied with the status quo, a good marketing agency focuses on testing new strategies each month, quarter, or year, so you can stay ahead of the curve.

Marketing agencies that test strategies on themselves first are ideal for many companies, especially small businesses, as they take on the risk to determine best practices and success before rolling out a plan to their clients.

Wondering if Accelity is a fit for you? Check out some of our clients’ engagements and results or contact us here for more information.