Digital Marketing Agency vs. Freelancers: Who to Hire?

Today, digital marketing is something that no business can afford to stay away from. Regardless of your enterprise’s shape or size, it remains one of the best ways to engage with prospects and turn them into returning customers. It can also give you lots of exposure and has the power to turn a small business into a brand that everybody’s talking about.

Therefore, it’s crucial to find the right people who will be able to take care of your online performance. This is especially true if you can’t afford to hire your own in-house marketing team, as it comes at a high price that many businesses simply cannot afford.

Luckily, there are alternative options to choose from, with hiring a digital marketing agency or collaborating with experienced freelancers being the two top solutions.

But who should you settle on to achieve the best results? Continue reading the article below to learn more about the potential pros and cons of working with a digital marketing agency or freelancers, so you can make an informed and well-thought-out decision.

 

Digital Agency vs. Freelancers: Factors to Consider

To determine who you should work with to bring your digital marketing efforts to the next level, you should consider some factors such as:

 

Areas of Focus

If you decide to start working with a digital marketing agency, you’ll essentially get a complete package of services. This means that whether you’ve been googling phrases such as “direct mail cost” for the past few weeks or you need some web copy and posts for your social media platforms, the agency will have you covered.

Most professional agencies in this field have employees who can take care of virtually every aspect of digital marketing, be it updating your website design or tracking your campaigns and performance. Moreover, their staff is used to collaborating, so even if your needs require the content team to work with the web development team, this won’t be an issue.

On the other hand, freelancers are usually skilled in one area. Therefore, hiring them may be a better option in situations when you only need someone to write excellent copy or want to focus solely on social media and get everything else covered. However, if you want to work on your entire marketing strategy, you may need to hire multiple freelancers at once, and their collaboration is likely to be less effective.

 

Workload and Time

Digital marketing agencies, especially those with multiple years of experience, usually have well-organized and highly efficient teams that can take on even the most significant workloads. Hence, if you’ve got a lot of aspects to cover and need help in most parts of your digital marketing strategy or want to build a new one from scratch, they should be more than capable of accommodating your needs.

Even if someone on the particular team goes on paid leave or suddenly gets ill, there will surely be someone to take over their responsibilities to continue working and deliver the results in a timely manner. Nevertheless, bear in mind that small agencies may not be able to achieve the same results as the most prominent players on the market.

When it comes to freelancers, they usually know their capabilities and should be able to tell you exactly how much workload they can take and still be able to meet the set deadlines. Moreover, in contrast to big digital marketing agencies, freelancers can often focus on just one client at a time, which means you may expect a more personalized approach on their part.

 

Quality

Digital marketing agencies that employ multiple people in one team can dedicate more resources to ensure that the work they deliver has been checked thoroughly and contains no errors.

Their structure should require them to move the given project from the creator to the editor so its quality can be checked and improved as needed. For instance, if the content team writes an article for your website, it will need to be approved before you receive and publish it for your customers to read.

However, freelancers usually do everything on their own. Thus, they’re the ones responsible for spotting errors such as typos or problems with verb form and tense.

If you choose to work with experienced freelancers, you should be able to rest assured that they will catch everything before sending it to you. However, at the end of the day, we’re all just humans, and if someone works entirely on their own, they may not be able to spot every single mistake.

This shouldn’t discredit them immediately, but you may want to keep in mind that they may not be able to deliver completely immaculate work every single time. Still, they will surely be more than open to making edits should you request them.

 

Longevity

Last but not least, if you’re looking for someone to work with you on a long-term project, you’ll need to be very upfront about it. That’s because digital marketing agencies tend to be more open to taking on projects that will take a long time to complete and may even be more capable of doing so. If they decide to work with you, they should present you with a list of targets and deadlines they would like to meet and seek your acceptance.

That’s not to say that freelancers won’t be interested in working on a more significant and time-consuming project. It’s simply important that you’re honest about your goals and needs from the start. This way, they will be able to decide whether they want and, most importantly, are capable of taking on a long-term project and give you an approximation of what you can expect from them during the collaboration.

 

In Conclusion

As you can see, when it comes to digital marketing, there’s simply no one-size-fits-all solution that will surely fit every single enterprise. Therefore, if you’re trying to determine who you should work with and debating whether it’s better to hire a digital marketing agency or a freelancer, you should consider the factors outlined in the article above.

A digital marketing agency may be a better option if you have a project that’s significant in size and would require the attention of more than one team. Such an agency can take on a more significant workload and work with you for a longer time.

Freelancers, on the other hand, tend to perform best when you want a more personalized approach and may be the best option for small enterprises that are taking their first steps in the world of digital marketing.

In the end, the final decision is entirely up to you!