Why Hiring an Agency is Beneficial During a Recession 

Hey guys, welcome back! We help small businesses build their brand online, generate more leads, and get more sales. Today, we're talking about why you might want to hire an agency over the next 12 months to really help accelerate your growth, especially as we might be entering or are technically in a recession. Here are some of the benefits of hiring an agency.

Cost-Effectiveness 
First of all, it's a lot more cost-effective, plain and simple. When you hire an agency, you're getting multiple people on a team: designers, video editors, strategists, ad buyers—you have a lot of expertise under one roof. In many cases, you're getting all of that for less than the cost of hiring one full-time employee. That's a huge benefit because even if you're hiring an intern right out of school, you're getting someone who is cheaper but has no experience. They don't know the most up-to-date technology, haven't run campaigns with hundreds of businesses, and don't have the support and resources of an agency. You're still paying more for that.

One-Stop Shop

 In many cases, when you hire an agency, it's a one-stop shop. They have everything you need to get the result you want. You don't have to micromanage them, train them, or worry about payroll, benefits, or sick days. They're going to execute regardless and do it right away. Especially as we're moving into a recession, this is a sweet spot for advertising. You want to get your ads up and running and capture that market share now. You don't want to spend the next year training and building up an in-house team just to miss the boat. 

Ready to Scale

 If you're at the point where you have a good product or service and are ready to scale, need solid advertising, and want to build your brand now, an agency is really the only option. Another huge benefit of hiring a marketing agency, specifically in the online advertising space, is that your money will be put to better use a lot faster. When using an inexperienced in-house team, you're spending money to be on platforms like Facebook. You might be spending a thousand a month, five thousand a month, ten thousand a month, or even a hundred thousand a month. There's a big difference in what you get out of that spend based on who's running it and what strategies they're using.

 Proven Systems 

When you hire an agency like Suit Social, we've developed our own system called Acquisition Branding. This ensures that every time we build a campaign, we get the best possible result. We have a streamlined, step-by-step process to ensure we get you where you need to be without wasting money. We're not testing on your dime; we've already tested hundreds, if not thousands, of times across all the campaigns we've run for years. When you come in the door, we're starting with what works. We're not figuring it out for six to twelve months. Whatever money you put forward in advertising will get you a result right away. You're not waiting a year to see if it comes back to you. An agency knows what works now because they're already doing it with other clients, potentially in your industry. 

Industry Expertise 

For example, our agency works with many home services companies like painting and cleaning companies. We know what works in that space, what the right offer is, what the right creative is, and what the right targeting is. When you hire a new team member, they might not know this. It will take them time to test and learn, which costs more money both for their time and the ad spend you're putting forth. We always tell our clients that our fees are super easy to justify because whatever you're spending on us, you're making back four or five times over in added efficiency. We're getting results faster, quicker, and better with the money you're spending. Whereas your in-house team might spend $100 to get a customer in the door, we'll get that customer in for $20. That's a big difference in terms of return on investment and a big benefit to why you're going to want to work with an agency. 

Accountability 

The last point I would say is overall accountability. When you hire a team member and they're learning, there will be mistakes—some small, some big. I'm not going to pretend that doesn't happen in an agency either, but there are a few things that protect you when you work with an agency. Agencies have their own processes of approval and accountability, so more people are looking at and approving stuff before it goes out, reducing the likelihood of mistakes. Instead of a rogue marketing agent that works for you, you have to check over, and when you don't, the wrong things go out, and errors can happen.

 E&O Insurance

 In the case of very large errors, this one's very important. If you're a bigger company and something in your advertising creates a lawsuit or an issue—maybe you said the wrong thing, it was illegal, prejudiced, offensive, or you used an image or a logo you didn't have the right to use, and now a company is coming after you—if an in-house employee makes that mistake, you are on the hook for that. Your business, your pocket, will be fronting that lawsuit, legal fees, and everything that comes with it. If an agency makes that mistake, we have something called E&O insurance (Errors and Omissions). If we make the mistake, we will be the ones to cover it. So when some big competitor comes at you with a $50,000 or $100,000 lawsuit, we're going to front that cost for you from our own insurance. Most individual small businesses don't have E&O insurance; marketing agencies do, law firms do, and that's one of our benefits. We pay a lot to get that, and that benefit gets extended to you. As a client, you can ask us for an E&O certificate, and we'll give you a certificate with our agency name and your company name, proving that our insurance company says, "Yep, if you make a mistake with that client, we're going to cover you." That's a huge benefit and something that can pay off the cost of the agency 100 times over if something ever does go wrong. 

Conclusion

 So those are all the reasons why you might want to consider hiring an agency over the next 12 months to help scale your online advertising campaigns.Best of all, if you do want to hire an agency, please check out suitsocial.com—that's www.suitsocial.com—to learn more about us, what we do for clients just like you, and how we can help you grow your business, build your brand, and get more leads. All that fun stuff. Check us out; there'll probably be a link in the bio below for that as well. Other than that, I will see you guys in the next topic.