Should I hire an agency or a freelance marketer?

Hire an agency when you have more work than judgement needed: several channels running at once, enough budget to keep a team busy, and someone in-house to brief them. Hire a freelancer when you know exactly which specialist job needs doing. Hire a consultant when you do not yet know which of those two you need, which is where most small businesses actually are.

That last case is the one nobody sells honestly, so it is worth spelling out what each option genuinely gives you.

What an agency is good at

Capacity and coverage. An agency has a designer, a copywriter, a paid specialist and an account manager already on the payroll, so it can run several things at once and absorb someone going on holiday without the work stopping. If you need volume produced every month, that is a real advantage and hard to replicate.

The trade is that you rarely get the person who won the pitch. Agencies are structured so that senior people sell and junior people deliver, which is not a scandal, it is just how the economics work. The other trade is the retainer. An agency needs predictable monthly revenue to keep that team employed, so it will push you towards one whether or not you need it yet.

What a freelancer is good at

Depth in one thing, at a sensible price, with the person you hired doing the work. A good freelance SEO or paid specialist will beat a mid-tier agency team on their own subject most of the time.

The trade is that a freelancer can only tell you about their own subject. Ask an SEO whether you need SEO and you will usually hear yes. That is not dishonesty, it is the limit of the brief. The other trade is continuity: one person gets ill, goes on holiday, or takes a full-time job.

What neither of them does

Tell you which one you need.

This is the gap. Most small businesses come to marketing with a symptom, not a diagnosis. Enquiries have dropped. The website does not convert. The ads cost more than they used to. That symptom could point at any of six different causes, and the usual next step is to hire whoever sells the fix for the cause you happened to guess at.

If you are not sure which it is, buy the diagnosis first and buy it from someone who does not need the answer to be their own service. That is a short piece of work, not an engagement, and it should cost far less than the thing it saves you from.

A rough test

Answer these honestly.

• Can you write the brief? If yes, hire the specialist. If no, you are not ready for either, because both will deliver exactly what you asked for.
• Is there someone in-house to manage them? An agency without a client-side owner drifts. A freelancer without one disappears.
• Is the problem one thing or several? One thing, hire a freelancer. Several genuinely at once, consider an agency. Several that might turn out to be one thing in disguise, get it diagnosed first.
• Would a retainer be earning its keep from month one? If you cannot say what it would produce in the first month, it is too early.

The honest version

We are none of the above at once. oXo Creatives is one person, Rob, doing fixed-price projects, which means we are excellent when you need a plan and the first execution of it, and the wrong choice when you need four channels produced every month forever. When that is what you need, an agency is the right answer and we will say so.

If you want to work out which one you are, book a free call. Thirty minutes, and if the answer is "hire a freelance paid specialist and do not spend money with us", that is what you will hear.