Is it Better to Hire an Online Marketing Agency or Full Time Employee?

Let's say you have $57,000 in your budget for business development this year, and you need marketing ROI. You're faced with a choice--outsource that work to an online marketing agency, or hire a full-time specialized employee who can become an integral part of your team and office? Wouldn't s/he be able to learn your business better from the inside?

If you value growth and marketing ROI, go with the online marketing agency. If you want to maximize your growth and marketing ROI, you need three things: knowledge, resources, and tools.

Online Marketing Agency vs. Full Time Employee

Let's be clear--we're not trying to step on anyone's feet. When having this discussion it's important to make a distinction between firing and replacing online marketing staff, or making the decision to hire a new specialized online marketing employee to handle your web presence (or to replace one who is leaving).

High level marketing managers/officers are still very much needed to coordinate all marketing efforts, and unless you're entirely focusing on online marketing, a staff employee will be able to better align offline and online efforts with the sales team.

That said, consider the following:

* One full time online marketing employee paid $57,000 a year is about equal to a 12 month online marketing agency contract, including licensing for the most powerful suite of online marketing analytics and automation software in the world. (Sadly, people aren't packaged with software.)
*Instead of one person, you're getting a dedicated team. A team that not only takes a personal interest in learning your unique business and challenges in and out, but one that values continuous personal development to meet a fast evolving online marketing landscape.
* An online marketing agency can specialize, assembly line style. Do you want one person juggling web development, content creation, SEO, graphic design, social media, customer interaction and online marketing strategy, or do you want a network of uniquely equipped professionals?
* Online marketing agencies don't take sick days.
* Or vacations.
* Or lose motivation.
* Or take the last of the coffee without filling it even though you've had that talk, what, half a dozen times now? (Is it too much to show some basic human decency?)

Growth Comes From Marketing ROI

We've talked about the Marketing ROI benefits of outsourcing to an online marketing agency before, but it comes down to the fact that a team of experts can always accomplish more than one person in a given amount of time.

It would be extremely difficult to find an individual who could expertly juggle all of the services we offer, and harder still to find a Super Employee who could excel at all that, and work for $57,000 or less. Even then, though, there are enormous benefits to an online marketing agency being able to pool and develop ideas and solutions as a group.

We work overtime to provide value to cover our costs and exceed them, because we want our clients to grow. It's great for them, and if they grow enough they might even move to a higher Mojo service tier and give us more money to invest for them! Everybody wins!

Mostly though, it's because this is what we love doing. We're an online marketing agency that is passionate about online Marketing ROI. It's fun. It's challenging. We're nerds about lead generation and conversion optimization.

When you have a group of people working for you who love their jobs, it's impossible to fail. Passion leads to success.