Why you should work with MPH Marketing Solutions (and why you shouldn’t manage your own advertising campaign or hire an employee to)
Many small business owners are all about the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) which stands for creating things for themselves without the aid of “on-duty, work-stationed” paid professionals. We understand what it’s like to be a small business owner (we’re one too!) and we get how frustrating it can be to try and decide where your limited marketing dollars should be spent. On the surface, to the untrained eye, marketing is something that can be self-taught with little difficulty.
The reality is the learning curve for a busy entrepreneur with little experience is staggering. With the time it takes to complete everything necessary in a day/week/month to implement a balanced marketing strategy it doesn’t leave time for much else (like you know, doing what you do best, running your business.) This can leave a small business owner with either an incomplete marketing strategy missing key elements, such as not having a great enough presence online or even having a poorly designed website and costing their business money.
Should I Hire an Employee or an Advertising Agency?
Now that we have established just how difficult it is to effectively implement your own marketing strategy small business owners are left with a choice: either hire an employee, dump the marketing duties onto an existing already busy employee (like an office manager) or hire an outside advertising agency. A lot of the time small business owners lean towards hiring an employee or delegating these duties to an already existing employee because that has been the process in the past to solve an immediate need. Business owners also may have the perception that an outside advertising agency is far more expensive than hiring in-house employee. This where there is a misconception.
Many owners fail to take into account all of the true costs associated with hiring (and keeping) an employee. When you hire an employee, not only do you have to account for their base salary but you must add in fixed costs like taxes, health insurance contributions, retirement plan matches, vacation time, sick days, etc. This means that the true cost can be 1.25 to 1.4 times the base salary.
Let’s use an example to show the difference. Say you’re small business that spends $50,000 annually on advertising. Below we will evaluate the cost of hiring an employee fresh out of college for a modest $35k annual base salary as your marketing manager with 1.3 times base salary for benefits.
Marketing Director Base Salary: $35,000
Benefits/Vacation/etc.: $10,500
True cost of hiring this employee: $45,500
Cost per month of hiring this employee: $3,791
This doesn’t even take into the account that this person has little experience and is going to be a one man show with no relationships with other media companies (google, tv, radio, newspaper, yellow pages, etc.)
Now let’s compare this to the cost of hiring MPH marketing solutions as your ad agency for a year with that same marketing budget of $50,000 and our 15% management fee.
Advertising Budget for Business: $50,000
Agency Annual Fee of 15%: $7,500
Agency Monthly Fee: $625
Benefits of Working with MPH Marketing Solutions
Aside from saving thousands of dollars, there are plenty of other advantages of working with us compared to hiring a marketing director or doing it yourself. Some of these advantages are the following:
- Expertise in your local market of Metro Detroit
- An honest dedicated partner who wants your advertising program to succeed
- Ability to get discounted rates on your current media programs from our already established relationships with other media sales representatives
- Experience in executing marketing plans
- No employee training required
- Avoid HR nightmares
- No additional overhead
- Tax deductions, not tax liability
- Free up more time for yourself
- Let us handle what we do best and let you handle what you do best which is running your company
Services that are included in our management fee are the following:
- In depth-market and industry analysis
- Conduct meetings with all advertising sales reps
- Creating an advertising strategy that makes sense for your budget
- Creative Consulting
- Budget Allocation
In conclusion the real question isn’t “can I afford an experienced marketing agency?” but rather “how much am I costing myself in time, money and lost opportunity by trying to do this in-house/on my own?”
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