The continuing repercussions of the Covid pandemic have shown the world the renewed importance of digital marketing – and with it, the importance of a standalone creative agency.
Content – in all its forms – has grown to dominate the marketing world as a crucial aspect of business performance. This means every company, every brand – and indeed, every entrepreneur – needs to reach their chosen target audience by creating and delivering useful content that ensures direct and consistent engagement.
Why outsource your marketing?
The need to market yourself is a given. But a lot of entrepreneurs and small to medium-sized firms do not want to have a full team of in-house writers, designers and marketing professionals who can help make that happen. This is why outsourcing is on the rise.
According to research by the Content Marketing Institute1, more than 50% of medium-sized businesses – and nearly 75% of large organisations – are outsourcing at least a part of their marketing requirements.
The reason is obvious: when you’re running a company, no matter how small, your focus must remain on the day-to-day operations. This means writing blogs, coming up with social media campaigns, designing creatives, etc., are not the best use of your time as a CEO or entrepreneur.
But how do you choose what kind of agency to go with?
Creative agencies: Understanding the difference
There are largely two types of creative agencies: the behemoths and the boutiques. The behemoths are giants, often with hundreds if not thousands of employees, a presence in dozens of cities or even countries, and a proven track record of award-winning campaigns.
Boutique creative agencies, on the other hand, are more agile, smaller outfits, based in fewer locations, with smaller staff and, often, refined expertise in certain key domains. For example, it is not difficult to find a boutique agency that specialises only in SEO, or one that exclusively does branding and creative design alone.
This itself helps you understand which one might suit your requirements more, but let’s take it just a little further – by exploring some unique advantages that only a boutique agency can give you.
3 key advantages of using a boutique creative agency
These advantages all come from the basic factors that make a boutique agency what it is to start with. And once you understand those, you’ll find it much easier to make your decision.
Advantage 1: Smaller agencies are more agile and flexible
When you have a small team of super-specialised people, each one a master of their own domain, you’ll find it is far easier for them to combine their forces in a wide variety of ways. For clients, this means boutique agencies can easily adapt to different types of projects and even different types of deliverables.
This level of flexibility is hard to come by in large agencies – it is not that they cannot handle different types of work, but that each department tends to be a mini-company of its own. This means it is not so easy to mix two different departments together to work on a small part of a larger project, leading to some rigidity in delivery.
Advantage 2: You get tailor-made solutions
Think of a boutique agency as your neighbourhood caterer as opposed to a giant eatery chain. A MacDonald’s only makes a certain number of types of burgers – and you can mix them up only to a certain extent. But your boutique caterer can whip up exactly what you prefer, done just the way you like it – because they have that flexibility.
This can prove a huge advantage to companies that only want to outsource one part of their marketing – or even outsource marketing during a particular event or season. It would be very difficult to get a huge agency to dedicate its large teams to just run one summer campaign for you. But a boutique agency can not only do that – they probably thrive on it.
Advantage 3: Boutique agencies are more efficient with budgets
Sometimes size can be a disadvantage: the moment you have hundreds of employees across dozens of locations, you’re dealing with massive overheads. This means large agencies simply won’t touch projects below a certain budget – because it doesn’t work for them.
Boutique agencies, on the other hand, are usually small, tightly knit teams that know exactly how far to stretch a buck. They’re used to working with all kinds of budgets and know how to maximise their resources to get the most out of every project.
This can be hugely beneficial for entrepreneurs or start-ups who don’t want to blow their entire annual budget in the very first quarter – which can happen if you don’t plan carefully. Again, this is something boutique agencies are much better suited to do, because they do it themselves.
Last but not least, it is very common for boutique agencies to have a wide network of experts and resources whom they can bring in just to work on specific aspects of a project – again, remarkably efficient use of budgets. Since they don’t need to keep that expert or consultant on payroll just waiting, it works out for everyone at the end.
Want to see how effective a smaller agency can be? Drop us a line and we’re happy to give you a free consultation to show just what we can do!
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References:
1. Content Marketing Institute, B2B Content Marketing Insights for 2022
