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Typical digital marketing agency retainers might be the obvious choice to increase leads and sales in your company, however they come with a range of problems. As a digital marketing agency ourselves who for years only offered these types of retainers, we’ve identified 7 key problems with typical agency retainers that you should keep in mind before you walk into something that you might regret.
In this article, we’re going to cover:
What is an Agency Retainer?
An agency retainer, also known as Marketing Done for You is where you pay a fixed fee per month for an external team to handle all your team’s digital marketing activities. This includes strategy, paid media, social media marketing, email marketing, lead generation, and more.
Typically, agency retainers work on the basis where the customer and agency agree to work together for a set amount of time at a monthly fixed cost.
At RedPandas, one of our services includes offering digital marketing ‘Done for You’ retainers, to help solve your revenue generating problems in any of the following areas:
- Content & Video Marketing
- Inbound Marketing
- Organic Search Marketing & SEO
- HubSpot Enablement
- Digital Advertising/Digital Media Buying
- Website support and maintenance
Although we do offer Done for You agency retainer services, for clients who are able to graduate to taking marketing in-house, we highly encourage businesses to explore training and coaching to insource their marketing as the impact produced is always far greater.
7 Problems with Typical Agency Retainers
There are 5 major problems with typical agency retainers:
- Harder to generate sales
- Speaking in your brand’s authentic voice is a challenge
- Quality control is difficult
- Speed of execution is slower
- You’re competing with the agency’s other clients
- Zero development of systems and processes
- More expensive in the long term
1. Harder to generate sales
You might think that generating sales is an easier task when you outsource your lead generation efforts to a team of experts, however, it’s actually harder than if you were to insource. Considering that a team of experts is handling your marketing activities for you, why is this the case?
Well, when an external agency works to generate you leads, they remain separated from your sales team and the feedback loop is slower. This truncated approach to business growth, where sales and marketing are separate, results in lower close rates and longer sales cycles. Ultimately, you end up with less sales.
On the other hand, when you insource your marketing efforts, you’re able to combine the marketing and sales team to form a revenue team, which gives your company the opportunity to implement a framework like They Ask, You Answer, to increase sales close rates and decrease the sales lifecycle.
2. Speaking in your brand’s authentic voice is a challenge
Who better to share your own brand’s message than those who directly represent your brand? Giving this very important role to someone external to your team and company will mean that the messaging and delivery will never be as true to the brand as it could be.
And when the messaging and delivery don’t accurately represent your brand’s authentic voice, you end up pushing out content that attracts the wrong type of customer, which ultimately leads to less sales and wasted time for salespeople.
However, when you insource, it’s easier to stay closer to the brand’s authentic voice, which helps your company attract the right type of customers.
3. Quality control is difficult
Quality control is harder when your marketing is handled by an external team because you can’t directly manage team members working in the agency and might instead be dealing with an account manager that isn’t actually doing the work.
This means that you lose control and quality often suffers. On the other hand, when you insource your marketing, you have an extremely high level of control over quality, oftentimes resulting in a more positive outcome.
4. Speed of execution is slower
When a marketing agency is doing the work for you, your team then has to approve the work before anything can go live. Once approved, the agency then has to move forward with the work. If you’re busy during the approval period and can’t get to it until another day or week, your agency may now be busy with other clients and will have to slot in the work they planned on a later day. This creates a time lag between work getting done and work being moved forward, because there is a longer wait time in communication when there is an external party, such as an agency, involved.
However, when it comes to working with an internal team, there are less time lags since everything is managed in house. There will be fewer communication channels that need to be accessed every time a marketing activity is ready for review from a manager, resulting in faster turnaround times. Faster turnaround times on work leads to more work overall being completed, and more value for your buck.
5. You’re competing with the agency’s other clients
When you’re in a personal relationship, you usually don’t want your love and affection being shared with someone. It’s a funny analogy we’ll admit but the point is important resources like time, energy and attention is shared with other clients. Are these clients bigger than you? Do they have more urgent priorities on particular days/weeks where perhaps the focus of your account wavers a bit?
With an internal team, you can be sure that your team members are solely focused on the growth of your company, which means 100% attention and focus to your company’s marketing every single day.
At RedPandas, for our ‘Done for You’ digital marketing retainer clients, although we can’t remove the problem entirely, we minimise it with client account manager caps. Each account manager must ensure they dedicate ample time (at least a day spread out in the week) for each client. If you do need to outsource your marketing, we highly recommend asking your potential agency how many clients each Account Manager has.
6. Zero development of systems and processes
When or if you terminate your engagement with your agency your internal team hasn’t developed the skills to pick up the pieces. At the end of the day you paid for execution not for getting the agency to train your team with all the skills and industry tricks of the trade they know.
On top of this, when you work with an agency, you don’t have the opportunity to develop systems and processes because the agency owns the systems and does the execution part for you. This puts you in a vulnerable position where your company is always ever-dependant on an agency for their marketing activities.
However, when you manage your marketing internally, you’re able to develop these systems and processes within your company, so that no matter who works in the different marketing roles in the future, they can pick up the pieces and get going. This is an evergreen approach, meaning that it’s long lasting, and thus, saves you a significant amount of money and time in the long run. This shifts the power from the agency to your company, allowing you to truly take charge of your marketing efforts and lead your company’s growth effectively.
7. More expensive in the long term
If an agency does their job right, the client shouldn’t need the agency after a certain amount of time. But we both know that this doesn’t happen. Agencies aim to be paid on an ongoing basis, so in the majority of cases, you’re stuck with them if you want any semblance of expanded growth through marketing.
However, this results in a situation where the cost to the business is greater in the long term because you miss out on saving costs where you wouldn’t have otherwise. For example, if you were able to get to a point where you no longer needed the agency and your team could handle the work themselves, the time your team would save on less time execution time lag means the cost of slow execution or inaction should be far less.
So, what’s my alternative?
The alternative to agency retainers is what we call ‘Done by You’ services. This is where an external team trains your internal team with the objective to eventually make you self-sufficient. This means that once your company has the knowledge, systems and processes in place, your team should never need an external agency to aid with marketing again.
Similar to done for you services, payments are made on a monthly basis. Unlike done for you services however, there is a fixed timeframe for your program and therefore payments. Once your team is trained and self-sufficient you no longer need to pay for done by you services.
How do we do Done by You marketing services at RedPandas?
We follow the ‘They Ask, You Answer’ (TAYA) framework for training and coaching our clients. At the core of TAYA is a really simple idea: educated prospects like you because they TRUST you and as such, you’re more likely to win the moment-of-truth click or call.
Here’s some of the most common questions we get asked about TAYA:
- What is TAYA?
- What is involved in TAYA Coaching Services?
- Who is TAYA Coaching right for?
- How much does TAYA Coaching cost?
Interested in TAYA Coaching for your business? Get in touch with one of our experts here.
