Many small business owners start out on their own. Sometimes it’s out of necessity, and sometimes it’s what they want. Over time, however, you’ll have to begin enlisting help for one set of tasks or another. You might start with a support person, take on a salesperson, and hire a customer service representative. Not long after those key hires, you start to wonder – could I get better marketing results if I used a marketing agency? But, how do you know when it’s time to stop doing it yourself (or delegating it to an overworked support person)?
1# Slow Growth in Sales and New Customers
If you believe the market demand for your product and/or service is strong and are confident in the excellence of your customer service, sales team, and pricing, the issue of slow sales may likely stem from ineffective marketing strategies. An insightful approach to this is by considering a free consultation offered by many marketing agencies. Seize the opportunity for a couple of consultations—they will assess your current efforts and provide valuable suggestions for enhancement. This process allows you to gauge the impact of your marketing efforts on your business and ideally, identify the agency that aligns with your needs.

2) It’s Not Getting Done
As the heading says, marketing is simply not getting done. You are doing five jobs (and that is just today!). Giving priority to the tasks that immediately pay the bills or put out the fires makes sense. Marketing, for any business, takes time to develop a working strategy, so in most cases we see, it quickly moves to the bottom of the pile. Since marketing is what marketing agencies specialise in, they can simultaneously take it off your plate and make it a top priority while costing a portion of what it would take to bring in an internal hire.
3) You Don’t Enjoy Marketing
It isn't everyone's cup of tea, that's for sure. Between keeping up with algorithm changes across multiple channels like Google and Facebook, to creating captions and designing social posts, the time can tick away fast! We've seen our fair share of quick blog posts (unfortunately, not optimised for SEO), uninspired emails and landing pages, and a haphazard approach to social media is not likely to bring the desired results. Marketing agencies love this stuff. We do geek out seeing the data behind the campaigns and seeing businesses flourish. We can bring our passion for marketing to your passion for your business.
4) You’ve Realised You Don’t Have the Skills
Building on #3, there's no shame when a talented and intelligent business owner admits that they don’t know anything about marketing. A good marketing agency will get to know you and your business really well and then apply their skills
5) “No Good Leads”
A good marketing agency will learn about your sales process and integrate their marketing with your team. With the support and input of your sales team, they’ll refine and adjust your marketing based on real results.
6) Your Marketing Results are "Wishy-Washy"
A marketing agency will look closely at your challenges and goals and put together a strategy to overcome those challenges and meet those goals. Over time, the strategy will be refined.
7) What is Working?
If you suddenly experience an increase in website traffic, phone calls, or new leads, do you know where they’re coming from? If you can’t answer that question, let a marketing agency answer it for you.
8) You’d Love to Hire a Complete Marketing Team, but the Expense is Too High. Consider Hiring a Marketing Agency.
To have a well-rounded team you'll need, an inbound marketing specialist, a content producer, an editor, a social media manager, a PPC specialist, and a graphic designer. This gets really expensive fast.
Even if that is out of reach for your smaller business, when you hire a marketing agency, you can still get the benefits of all that experience and all those skills - for about the cost of one employee.
If you’re currently working with a marketing agency, what made you realise it was time? If you're not at the moment let's have a chat to see how we can help you and your business. If you are a start-up digital marketing agency and found value in this blog, we partnered with DesignRush. You can find more resources here.