Do small businesses need a marketing agency?
Often, no. An honest look at when hiring an agency makes sense, when it's premature, and what to do instead if it is.
By Morgan Richter
We're an agency, so treat this with appropriate suspicion. But we'd rather turn away work that isn't ready than take a retainer from someone who'd have been better off spending it elsewhere — that ends badly for both of us.
Here's the version we'd give a friend.
When it's probably too early
Marketing amplifies whatever is already true about a business. If the underlying thing isn't working, amplification makes the problem arrive faster.
- You're not yet sure who the customer is. No agency can market its way to product-market fit on your behalf.
- The offer changes every month. There's nothing stable to build a position around.
- You can't currently handle more customers. Demand you can't serve costs you reputation.
- The budget would be your last money. Marketing is rarely fast enough to be a rescue.
When it does make sense
The clearest signal is a bottleneck that's specifically about visibility rather than about the business itself.
- People who find you tend to buy — you just need more of them finding you.
- You know the marketing needs doing and it keeps losing to operational work. This is the most common one.
- You've outgrown doing it yourself, and the hours you spend on it are worth more elsewhere.
- You have something genuinely worth saying and no idea how to say it consistently.
The middle option most people skip
It isn't a binary between doing everything yourself and handing it all over. A lot of small businesses get further with a short strategy engagement — positioning, a content format they can run, and a plan — and then execute it in-house.
That costs a fraction of a retainer and often works better, because nobody understands the business like the person running it. We say this to people fairly regularly.
If you do hire one
Look for someone who asks about your margins and your capacity before they talk about content. An agency that starts with deliverables rather than with your business is selling you a package, not a solution.
And be wary of anyone who guarantees results. Nobody can, and the ones who promise it are the ones who'll report on follower counts when the sales don't come.
If this is the sort of thing you’d rather hand over, read about what we actually do, or tell us what you’re working on.