When should I get help with marketing?

The question is usually asked as "can I afford an agency", which is the wrong end of it. The useful question is what is actually stopping you — time, skill, or not knowing what to do — because those three are solved by different people, and paying the wrong one is how most small businesses conclude that marketing does not work.

Work out which bottleneck you have

1. Time. You know what to do, you can do it, you never get to it. This is the commonest by a wide margin, and it is the cheapest to solve — a tool, a routine, or a few hours of someone's week.
2. Skill. You know what you want and cannot produce it — decent video, a website that works, ads that do not waste money. Buy the specific skill, as a project.
3. Direction. You do not know what you should be doing at all. This is the expensive one to get wrong, because handing direction to someone who does not know your business produces confident work aimed at nothing.

Be honest about which one it is. Buying an agency retainer to solve a time problem is paying a strategist to do an hour of admin.

What outsources well

• Production. Photography, video editing, design. Discrete, briefable, and the difference between amateur and professional is visible.
• Websites. A build is a project with an end. Ongoing "management" of a small site usually is not.
• Paid advertising. Genuinely technical, easy to waste money on, and a competent buyer earns their fee at almost any spend that matters.
• Technical SEO. The plumbing — speed, structure, indexing — is specialist and largely a one-off.
• Anything you hate. A task you loathe will not get done at any price, so buying it is buying the outcome.

What should not leave the building

• Replying to customers. The person answering enquiries is having sales conversations. Outsource that and you have outsourced the part that makes money.
• Your offer and your prices. Nobody else can decide what you sell or what it is worth.
• Knowing what you actually do. Agencies write about your work from a briefing. It shows.
• Your own account access. Covered below, and it matters more than everything else here.

The three ways to buy help

A freelancer

Usually the right first step. One person, one skill, priced by project or day. Cheaper than an agency, and you talk to the person doing the work rather than an account manager. The risk is availability — a good freelancer gets busy, and holidays are holidays.

An agency

Worth it when you need several skills running together and enough volume to keep them busy. Below a certain spend you are paying for the account management rather than the work, and you frequently get the junior. Ask who will actually be doing it, by name, and ask to see work they did themselves.

Hiring someone

Makes sense once marketing is a permanent job rather than a project — usually when there is enough volume that briefing an outsider costs more than doing it in-house. Expensive and slow to reverse, so it comes later than people expect.

Buy a project before you buy a retainer

The single most useful rule here. A monthly retainer is comfortable for the supplier and vague for you. A project has a deliverable, a price and an end, and it tells you what working with them is like for a fraction of the commitment.

If it goes well, extend it. If it does not, you have lost one project rather than a year.

Own your accounts. All of them.

This is the thing that costs small businesses most and is almost never discussed until it goes wrong.

• The domain should be registered to you, in an account you control.
• The ad accounts should be yours, with the agency given access rather than ownership. An agency-owned ad account takes your history and your audiences with it when you leave.
• Google Business Profile, social accounts, analytics — all yours, all with them as a manager.
• The website files and a way to move the site. "We host it" is fine; "you cannot take it" is not.

Any supplier who resists this is telling you something important. A good one will suggest it before you do.

Red flags

• Guaranteed rankings. Nobody can guarantee a position in results they do not control.
• Twelve-month contracts with no exit. Three months, or a project, is plenty to prove value.
• Reporting that only shows impressions and followers. If nothing in the report is enquiries or sales, the report is designed to look good.
• No questions about your business. Anyone who can start without understanding what you sell is going to produce something generic.
• A price with no scope. "£800 a month for social media" is not an offer; it is a number.

What to ask before you sign

1. Who will do the work, and can I see something they made?
2. What exactly do I get each month, in numbers?
3. What do you need from me, and how much of my time?
4. How will we know in three months whether this worked?
5. What happens to the accounts and the work if we stop?

Hesitation on the last two is the answer.

The bottom line

Name the bottleneck first. Buy production and advertising, keep customer conversations and your offer. Start with a freelancer and a project rather than an agency and a retainer, insist on owning every account in your own name, and judge it on enquiries rather than impressions. See also how much to spend on marketing.