Marketing agencies are a go-to option for many marketing leaders when they need tactical execution: best for when you have high priority work that needs to be done that can’t be done with the resources you have in-house.
Marketing consultants are seasoned experts who provide strategy and guidance, often sitting outside of the day-to-day work that happens within your team: hands-on execution is less common and recommendations often require execution from you, your team, or additional resources.
In this article, I share some of what I’ve learned over the years as a head of marketing, once-consultant, and now agency owner. I cover why you might hire a marketing agency versus a marketing consultant, some of the things you should consider (and watch out for), and why we structure ércule—a content systems agency—the way that we do.
When should you hire a marketing agency?
Hire a marketing agency when you’re looking to extend your team and its execution capabilities when resources get tight and priorities are overwhelming.
An agency should help with whatever you’ve hired them for, and they often have multiple people to allocate part-time to company’s needs, so deadlines are hit and work is completed. Marketing agencies are also a good option when you know exactly what you need the agency to do.
What should you look out for when hiring a marketing agency?
I have a lot to say here, but I’ll stick to my top 3 considerations from my time as a head of marketing evaluating agencies.
- Do you have someone to manage the agency relationship who has a clear understanding of what the agency needs to get done? If you don’t give clear direction to an agency on what to do, you risk them not doing much. Agencies are often too distanced from your strategy to take initiative or act autonomously.
- Is the agency specialized in the work you need them to do? If you don’t hire the right agency for the job, they might not be well-equipped to do it. Make sure the agency you hire has a track record of success in what you’re hiring them for—and if an agency says they can do everything, from paid, to organic, to design, to web development, just run. I’ve never seen that end well.
- Will you be working with the agency’s A-team, or handed off to someone with little experience? Don’t get me wrong, I love working with enthusiastic, early career folks—but your agency is not the place to do this. Find the right balance for your budget, but always confirm who you’ll be working with throughout the engagement, their experience with your industry, and prior work. Hand-offs to less-experienced account managers are common.
When should you hire a marketing consultant?
Marketing consultants are a good option when you need to bring in an expert to help advise on strategic topics—and to help you figure out what you should be executing on. Companies hire marketing consultants when they need experts who have been there before to help them navigate uncertain territory. Consultants are often specialized in a specific area, like product marketing or SEO.
What should you consider when hiring a marketing consultant?
Marketing consultants can use their knowledge and expertise to tell you exactly what gaps you have and how to address them. But as a one(or few)-person specialized show, they are often under-resourced to fill the gaps they find. This means you have to re-allocate your team’s resources or hire additional contractors, consultants, or agencies to execute on their recommendations.
If the consultant is able to fill all of those gaps themselves, It can take much longer than it would take an agency, because consultants (and consultancies) are generally not resourced to execute on work quickly at a meaningful scale. Additionally, they are often set up to work independently of your team’s primary work streams which further slows their progress.
Marketing agency vs consultancy: why not both?
Internally, we jokingly refer to our agency, ércule, as a “consulgency.” We’ve intentionally structured ércule as a mixture of experts (LLM pun intended) with deep expertise across marketing disciplines to partner closely with your team and accelerate execution.
Sure, companies hire us to help them grow organically through content. At face value, this can sound pretty tactical: companies need content, and they need us to help them execute on it.
What companies actually get from our the partnership looks a lot more like specialized consultants from multiple backgrounds — who have been there before — collaborating on your strategy with you, and extending your execution capabilities, too.
ércule partners have a mixture of backgrounds as heads of marketing, ops leaders, product marketers, and technical writers at companies like GitHub, MongoDB, IBM, Microsoft, Atlassian, AWS, and Coder. We waste no time getting deeply familiar with your strategy and your product. Speaking for myself, it’s what I love to do.
In a matter of weeks (not months), we’re hitting the ground running, helping you extend the capabilities of your team through building intelligent content systems that utilize your input and feedback as our primary feedback loop, with measurement, optimization, and distribution built-in.
So, wait, is ércule an agency or a consultancy?
For now, we refer to ércule as an agency: a content systems agency that indexes on deep partnership, collaboration, and trust with our clients. When you work with us, you’re working with a variety of experts working together to build systems that illuminate and extend your expertise through content and marketing.
You can hire us for a product marketing or analytics engagement, as strategic consultants, but it’s not what we’re built for. Unlike most agencies—where the bigger they are, the less direct expertise you have access to—you get the best of us when you work with more of us in a full agency engagement.
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