Are you looking forward to fulfilling your marketing needs but cannot decide whether to hire a freelancer or knock on the door of a big marketing agency? Don’t worry, we have got you covered. In the past couple of years, a lot of talented individuals across the globe decided to do something productive while at home. Some took art as their favorite pastime and some discovered that they like cooking food as much as they like eating it. Then some business-heads saw this opportunity as an exit pass from their boring corporate jobs and started their small business.
This infusion of new small-scale businesses in our society is beneficial for our national economy and specifically for the marketing industry. A newly set up business is required to have a flawless advertising campaign to tell customers that it exists, that consumers now have one more option to choose from and they can help the Indian economy by supporting local businesses. Realizing the importance of marketing, selecting an advertisement partner is often a headache for a new business owner.
A new business owner or a business owner, in general, has a lot to worry about, from research, development, setting up a factory, production, quality control, and packaging to logistics, customer satisfaction, managing the cash flow, undercutting the competition and the list goes on. On top of all these things, we don’t want our entrepreneur friends to be worried about their marketing needs and therefore we decided to help them out. We looked into it and found a fundamental confusion between Digital Marketing Agency vs Freelancers – that was common among businesses of all sizes and experiences.
Which is a better option: Digital Marketing Agency vs Freelancers?
We compiled all our experiences and learnings from the marketing industry and concluded that there is no clear winner between the two. As a consumer, you need to decide what’s best for you. To help you with that, we have listed down 5 key points that you should think about before making a decision.
- When do you want your project to be completed?
- Is it a one-time project or a recurring project?
- What quality do you expect?
- Is your project large-scale or small-scale?
- What price are you willing to pay for your project?
When do you want your project to be completed?
As a client, you want your work to be done as soon as possible but the question is when do you really need it? Marketing agencies, with all their resources and employees, can deliver much faster as compared to an individual doing all the work alone. If you are setting up a new business and are willing to wait for a few weeks for your project to be completed, then hiring a freelancer is probably the way to go.
However, things in business do not work out at a static pace and there are times (like during festivals) when marketing agencies are swamped with big orders from old customers and they will take longer than freelancers to do your project as their priority will be their existing customers.
Moreover, if you have a small project and you happen to know a freelancer who is not working on any project at the given time, he can do the job faster as his only priority will be your project.
Is it a one-time project or a recurring project?
It is feasible to go with big firms if your project is going to be repeated periodically for several reasons. Firstly, freelancers are often between jobs and projects which makes their availability uncertain. If the next time you need to get a project done, the freelancer you hired last time is busy with a big project or has already taken up a job, you will have to find another one and there is no guarantee if he will do the job as good as the previous one.
So, if you are someone who likes consistency, a marketing agency will be a better pick for you even if your project is small-scaled. But keep sure that if want your work done by some agency be it the best digital marketing agency in town.
Secondly, if you want a project to be done every now and then, it is probably better to become a permanent client at a big firm as they will offer you discounts and privileges which a freelancer cannot offer. For example, if you need an urgent project to be done during a busy season, an agency will put all its resources to work to get your work done as they don’t want to lose a permanent customer. On the other hand, all the freelancers are occupied during a busy season and they cannot abandon one project to do your work.
What quality do you expect?
Every customer wants and deserves the best quality, but quality here means do you want your project to be a tailored fit or a professional cut. If you know exactly what you want and you want things to be done precisely in a certain way, freelancers will do just that. The thing is, freelancers are habitual of completing the entire project themselves and therefore they tend to have better knowledge of various aspects of a marketing project as compared to an employee of a big firm. Thus, they can execute smaller projects with much more precision and as a result, your project will be a custom-fit for you.
In a marketing agency, the workload is divided among groups of people. They have a separate team for online advertising and within this team, there are different groups of people responsible for different things like SEO, pricing, trends, influencers, and so on. Similarly, different groups and teams are responsible for offline marketing therefore one employee may not have the complete knowledge of everything that is required to do your project. Coordinating separately with all the teams is time-consuming and inefficient for small projects.
On the contrary, having separate teams for different tasks implements specialization which means your project will be completed faster with a much more professional touch to it.
Remember, a freelancer will come to you but you have to go to an agency. So, if you want someone to come to you and cater to your needs exactly how you want, freelancers are better. In other words, if you know what you want and you just want someone to execute it, a freelancer will do that for you.
Is your project large-scale or small-scale?
It must be getting clear to you that in what situations a freelancer is better than an agency. In simple terms, freelancers cannot handle large-scale projects efficiently and I do not see any advantage in handing over a large-scale project to a freelancer. One of the most important reasons for hiring a freelancer is his creativity, which a corporate employee of a big firm lacks. In the case of big projects, an individual freelancer will be overwhelmed by the amount of work, deadlines and his creativity will be exhausted by working on the same project for several weeks.
Digital marketing agencies are designed to handle big and diversified projects and they often have some experience in the same. The specialization of work that we talked about earlier as a downside, will become an upside in case of big projects. Quick distribution of workload among specified teams will decrease the time required and since each team member will know his job, the efficiency will increase.
Moreover, large-scale projects are prone to malfunctions therefore big firms have debugging protocols in place so that in case of a failure, it is quickly rectified.
What price are you willing to pay for your project?
One may assume that a marketing agency will cost more than a freelancer but that is not the case every time. It depends on many factors like the size of your project, features you want. How quickly you want it and what value will that project produce for your business. It’s like, you will buy a custom stitched suit worth 10,000 only when it is going to add 50,000 worth of value to you but if you want 100 shirts, you will probably go with the readymade ones.
If you have a small-scale one-time marketing project focused on a specified audience, hiring a freelancer is cost-efficient but if you have a large-scale project that targets a wider audience and you want the project to be done periodically, a marketing agency will be a better option.