Marketing agencies are known for being overly tactical - and even naive - to business goals, but are praised for expanding a team’s ability to execute.
Marketing consultants act as a strategic thought partner to your business, but are criticized for being lofty in guidance without hands-on execution.
At ércule, we think there’s a sweet spot in the middle that we internally refer to as a “consulgency.” We believe an agency can rapidly execute, and also be a strategic thought partner for you, too.
But first, let’s look at the common definitions we’re working with (and against):
Marketing agencies execute
The reason you hire a marketing agency is to extend your team and its capabilities. You give the agency jobs, and they do those jobs.
They 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 sometimes a good option when you’re hiring for a specific task and you know exactly what you need the agency to do.
The downside of marketing agencies? If you don’t tell them exactly what to do, they won’t know what to do. They’re paid to do the work you tell them to do, whether it’s campaign execution, design, or writing.
Your guidance and briefs are the fuel for their progress. Without it, they are operating with minimal context, and they can’t find their way alone.
Marketing consultants consult
On the other hand, marketing consultants are brought on to help you find your way. You hire a marketing consultant when you need an expert human who has been there before to help. Consultants are often specialized in a specific area, like product marketing or SEO.
Marketing consultants can use their knowledge and expertise to tell you exactly what gaps you have and how to address them. But unfortunately, as a one(or few)-person specialized show, they are often under-resourced to fill all of the gaps they find.
If the consultant is able to fill all of those gaps themselves, It will often take 5-10x the time it would take an agency, because consultants (and consultancies) are generally not resourced to do work quickly at a meaningful scale. Additionally, they are often set up to work independently of your team’s primary workstreams which further slows their progress.
The best of both worlds: an agency of experts who can execute
At ércule, 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.
When we get hired, we jump in with the team, we listen, and we get aligned.
We call ourselves an agency, but 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.
Most ércule partners have a background in technical product marketing, and the first thing we do is work closely with teams to understand their product deeply. We dig into differentiation, priority themes and campaigns, market trends, and competitive landscape.
Then we get to work.
Once content is produced, we consult on distribution strategy and placement across your website and consider additional formats for repurposing. And we measure how the content performs, so we can feed te results back in to the next set of inputs for what we produce next.
And this is just the content loop. We work with clients on content, CRO, LLM visibility, SEO, analytics, product marketing, and more. For each of these areas, we have experts who have been there before as operators and leaders at companies like GitHub, Microsoft, Atlassian, and MongoDB.
Our agency of experts is made up of specialized marketers who consult on strategy and also act as generalists when it comes to execution.
Through this model, we bridge the worlds of consultant-as-a-thought-partner and agency-as-an-execution-engine — we believe you need both.
