When building any business, it’s crucial to have a powerful marketing approach. You can either work with digital marketing consultants from a reputable agency or hire a freelancer to accomplish this vital task.
Doing it yourself may appear to be more cost-effective than the methods mentioned above, but it’s not usually the case. Your internal team must have extensive experience and undergo specific training to execute the right marketing strategy.
On the contrary, delegating the task to digital marketing experts will give you better chances of getting positive results. It will be the best investment for your business that can yield substantial revenue and growth.
But is there a difference between hiring a digital marketing freelancer and working with an agency? While their technical skills may seem to overlap, there are several significant distinctions between them.
Digital Marketing Solution: Freelancers vs. Agency
The best way to determine which approach will work best for your business is to understand the advantages and drawbacks that come with hiring a freelancer or a digital marketing consulting agency:
Skillsets
Having already worked with several companies, seasoned digital marketing freelancers usually have extensive experience under their belt. However, their exposure may not be as diverse as digital marketing agencies. It will be pretty challenging to find a freelancer with a broad range of skillset that applies to your type of business – whether B2B or B2C.
A digital marketing agency, on the contrary, is more versatile and has broader combined skillsets. You’re not only entrusting your business growth to a single person but a group of digital marketing consultants, each focusing on specific facets of the marketing campaign.
Flexibility
Flexibility is one of the strong points of freelancers since they don’t have a limited work schedule of 9 to 5. With their flexible working hours, they can provide you assistance during a potential crisis, such as dousing the flame of nasty social media comments. However, some freelancers charge extra fees for working overtime in the evenings or during weekends.
Opting for a digital marketing agency offers more than just flexibility. While they have fixed work hours – like any established business – some agencies render support even beyond their regular work schedule for additional costs. However, these agencies provide more flexible payment options, which can be especially helpful for startups or local businesses.
Quality
Unless you can find a freelancer who has past experience working in the same niche as your business, don’t expect significant results from your marketing campaign. While most freelancers are experts in the field in their own right, it’s still a one-man team. With only a single person handling all the digital marketing tasks, the overall quality of work will not be on the same level compared to a group of digital marketing consultants.
When you avail of a digital marketing solution offered by an agency, you are hiring a group of experts – each of them focused on a specific skill. As a result, you can get substantial results faster without affecting the quality of service they deliver.
Cost
You won’t have to pay a freelancer an amount equivalent to a full-time, in-house salary. However, a digital marketing freelancer would usually charge a per-project per hour price. It can be pretty costly if you add it all up, especially with more marketing projects involved in the long run. The payment schedule could also be tighter than working with an agency.
While it’s true that an agency can charge you more when compared to a freelancer, the advantages you get make up for the cost. You’ll be getting more satisfactory and high-quality work because you have a team of digital marketing masters handling your SEO campaigns. They also have a range of payment schedules to help you better manage the operational costs.
Reliability
There is a greater risk involved with freelancers when it comes to service reliability. While they work independently and most consider their reputation crucial to their business, there’s always a possibility of them suddenly going AWOL or, worse, quitting mid-project. However, excellent digital marketing freelancers will push for positive results since they’d want you to recommend them to other business owners.
Established agencies have a reliable business structure. As such, they communicate better and provide outstanding services. Award-winning digital marketing agencies take reliability to even greater heights because they deliver excellent results. There’s also no risk of the entire agency disappearing without a trace.
Choose the Right Approach for Your Digital Marketing Needs
There are freelancers, and there are digital marketing agencies. But if you need to choose between the two, the latter is always the better choice. You’ve got a team of experts handling your marketing campaign, and their synergy can produce better and faster results. Diffactory provides excellent digital marketing results to Kansas City business owners – improving their clients’ promotional or SEO strategies.
Contact Diffactory today for a free consultation to help boost your business to greater heights.