It is great to have someone in-house to handle your marketing but it does not always get you the best result. Having worked in marketing for several years I can tell you first-hand about the performance problems and over spending when hiring internally. This post will explain why you should opt for the marketing companies working on commission only.
A good marketer needs to understand what the company is aiming to achieve as well as the costs involved and ROI. They need to be given a project and focus on that specific goal.
Problems with internal marketing
Distractions
As the employer is paying a basic salary, they will often find alternative jobs to utilise the hours that they are paying for. This takes the marketer away from focusing at the mission in hand, usually to do random IT jobs. Marketers and IT are completely different jobs, if you employ someone to generate leads then let them do that job.
Set Hours
If a marketer is contracted to work for a company, it is likely that their contract states set hours that they should be working. Digital marketers need to keep a constant eye on running adverts to ensure that the CPC and CPL are not increasing. Many problems can occur during evening hours, it only takes one social media comment from an online troll and your results will decline. If your marketer finishes work at 18:00, I can assure you that they will switch off from the job at 18:00.
The employer does not always know best
It is your company and you would like to have the final say and be involved in the decisions. However, if you have employed a good marketer, you have to trust them and let them work on what they believe to be best. Unless you are the owner of a digital marketing company, you should not understand marketing better than the person you have employed. Employers often tell their marketers how they want them to work, or ask them to work in ways that will bring poor results. As the marketer is contracted to that company, they will often not speak up, and simply do as they are told. This will cost the company a lot of unnecessary money.
Lower Budgets
As you are paying the marketer a basic wage, social security, holiday pay, and sick pay, you will find yourself left with a lower advertising budget than if you paid an external company or freelancer.
No value of money
If the marketer is not fronting any of the marketing costs themselves, they may spend recklessly and waste money on ads that are underperforming.
Benefits to external marketing
Honesty
A good external marketing company or freelancer will be honest with you. They are not here on a job interview; they want to make money! If your idea is bad, they will tell you it is bad, they will not invest their time or money into something that they do not believe to be cost effective. If they are only being paid on results then they will budget their costs wisely to maximise their ROI.
Working hours
You are not paying by the hour; this allows the marketer to keep a constant eye on the project at hand. If a digital advert stops performing at 19:00, they will pause it and make amendments to the audience demographic. Had this been an internal marketer, the underperforming advert could run through the night burning a hole in your marketing budget.
Understanding the value of money
They spend the money as if it is their own money… Because it is their own money!
Cost affective
You only pay for the results agreed prior to starting. You do not pay a marketer while they are on break, holiday or off sick. Nor are you paying their social security! There are no employment contracts, so no redundancy pay-outs should you no longer need the marketer.
Finding marketing companies working on commission only
Although there are tons of benefits running your marketing externally, there are still bad companies out there. Before understanding marketing, I paid a company to £500 upfront to send an email blast to 20,000 people, sounds like a good enough deal, wrong, it generated zero leads and only a 3% click rate.
If a company or freelancer is confident that their abilities are a good match with your project, they will work commission only and take a higher back-end commission on results. If a company is not willing to front any money or time themselves, it is because they do not believe what you are aiming to achieve will work.
The problems finding marketing companies working on commission only, is that they need to physically have the money to pay for it. They may offer a trial run to see exactly how much they can make and use the profits from the trial to scale up the project.
Do you want to know if we will pay for your next project?
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