If you are wondering as to why hire a marketing agency for eCommerce marketing, here’s the short answer: people’s productivity makes a difference to your “cash power”.
Bringing experimented folks aboard helps unlock business situations, and what an agency can do for you.
They can have more experience or expertise in certain domains - and instead of you learning everything/hiring people altogether, you can buy their time. At the end of the day, that's how agencies work.
So, you hire a marketing agency when execution is outpacing your team.
The main benefits of hiring a marketing agency:
- You get specialist skills without hiring full-time,
- You free your calendar for strategy,
- You move faster across channels,
- You can benefit from other people experiences;
In short — you work *on* the business instead of drowning *in* it.
Michael E. Gerber in his bestselling book “E-Myth Mastery” writes:
Going to work on your business, rather than in your business, is the key to building a world-class company
Notice the emphasis on the word “on”? It’s the single most important thing that differentiates whether you control your business or if your business controls you.
Further in the book, Michael also writes:
Your staffing is dictated by your organizational strategy, your systems development plan, your business plan, and your budget
Here’s why you should hire a marketing agency for eCommerce marketing.
Here are the 6 main benefits of hiring a marketing agency:
- Plan your workload and calendar — no more "hire, train, fire" cycle.
- Master your acquisition channels — one team connecting the dots.
- Close knowledge gaps — their expertise fills what you don't do daily.
- Measure ROI — offload execution, benchmark results against competitors.
- Get better tools — agencies bring a stack (and you can challenge it).
- Align on growth goals — they work to your KPIs, in your brand voice.
Agency vs freelancer vs in-house
I've done all roles - both from the brand perspective, to being a freelancer/agency owner/in-hour marketer myself.
So I want to make this part as clear as I can.
When to hire a freelancer (pros and cons)
- Budget is key to your decision
- You need one key expertise, with someone you can trust
- You need to consistently be in touch with the same person for the job to work
When to hire an agency (pros and cons)
- The job needs more than 1 expertise (emails and ads, ads and landing pages, content and ads, etc.)
- You need daily ownership on the long term
- You need at least one person full time, or a team, not just one person part-time
When to hire in-house (pros and cons)
- You need daily ownership on the long term,
- Brand knowledge and team coordination is heavily important,
- You're looking to find someone who can expand a team later.
Of course, most growing ecommerce brands run a mix — in-house owner, an agency for one heavy channel, a freelancer for the odd job.
Plan Workload Capacity and an Expect Marketing Calendar
Typically, businesses (including eCommerce businesses) have too many moving parts, people, resource allocation, and management.
Most eCommerce businesses, meanwhile, are run with solo entrepreneurs and small teams at best. Either way, you’ll do better handing over work to a marketing agency to help push your business forward since you can avoid having to “seek, hire, train, fire, hire, fire, train” cycle.
With an agency to do all the heavy-lifting for the nuanced work that modern-day marketing involves -- with it being 1/3rd science, 1/3rd art, and 1/3rd-technology -- you can plan your workload, resources, time, and manage business better.
In practice: list the tasks you repeat weekly — those are the first to hand over.
Master Your Acquisition Channels
With the marketing agency working alongside, you’ll be able to take a holistic approach to marketing, connect the dots, and start to internalize the workings of each acquisition channel for e-commerce marketing.
How do ads work, and why do they work the way they? What are some of the trending new social media platforms and do they make sense to be active there for new customer acquisition?
In practice: ask any agency to walk you through how they'd connect your channels, not just run them separately.
Identify Knowledge Gaps for Expertise
You know what you know. Agencies know what they know. While you know your business inside out, agencies know theirs.
The way it works with marketing agencies -- especially in the case of having agencies manage marketing for eCommerce -- is to identify knowledge gaps, rely on their expertise to execute campaigns faster, and find creative solutions to everyday marketing-related issues you’ll face.
Identify time constraints for things you already know how to do.
In practice: name the two skills you're weakest at — that's your brief.
Calculate ROI potential
With some parts of marketing offloaded and outsourced (such as email marketing strategy and execution), your business is left with saved time, resources, and a lot more wiggle room for everything else that you should focus on -- such as customer support, strategic growth, partnerships, and so much more.
But even with email marketing agencies, thanks to the way email marketing programs are structured, you can start measuring the ROI (Return on Investment) of email marketing for eCommerce.
You can also start benchmarking your own results against that of your competitors and also see how you fare with regards to the industry or niche your e-commerce business operates in.
In practice: agree on the 2–3 numbers you'll judge success by before you sign.
Use Tools to Challenge Status Quo and Manage your Marketing Agency
Most agencies tend to certain marketing strategies that they roll out as soon as businesses sign up with them.
On the same note, agencies tend to use a fixed set of marketing tools, analytics tools, and other elements of the marketing stack -- that’s their normal.
While you don’t have to micromanage agencies and their work (unless performance goes south), it’s a good idea to “challenge” the relationship itself.
You can partake in strategy discussions, provide ideas to agency managers to make your campaigns run better, discuss budgeting, and also let them know about new tools that can be used.
With tools such as Panoramata, for instance, your team and the marketing agencies themselves will always have inspiration, benchmarking, swipe lists, and collections that be used for creatives, ads, email marketing design, email marketing copy, email subject lines, frequency of emails, and so much more. You not only gather inspiration (on a rolling basis), but also have everything you need for competitor marketing tracking.
In practice: bring a competitor benchmark to the first call so the agency starts from evidence
Consider Growth Goals
You know your business best.
As an entrepreneur, you’ll relay the most important goals that your marketing agency should strive to achieve on your behalf. More often than not, your business goals need to be reiterated.
Apart from emailmarketing KPIs (that you’ll measure), you’ll be able to advance towards other goals that could be a little less tangible than KPIs such as open rates, click rates, and revenue.
Once you consider (and share) overall growth roles with your potential marketing agency, managers who oversee your business will be better equipped with your brand voice. They’ll be able to align resources to match your ultimate goals and work towards most of the goals cohesively.
In practice: write your goals in one sentence each — if you can't, the agency can't hit them
FAQ
Why hire a marketing agency for ecommerce?
To get specialist execution without the cost and lag of full-time hires. An agency frees your time for strategy, moves faster across channels, and lets you measure ROI against real benchmarks.
What are the benefits of hiring a marketing agency?
Six main ones: workload planning, channel mastery, filling knowledge gaps, measurable ROI, a stronger tool stack, and tight alignment on growth goals.
When should you hire a marketing agency?
When execution is bottlenecked, when you're missing skills you can't hire full-time for, or when your calendar is so full you can't work on strategy. If those aren't true yet, a freelancer or a tool may be enough.
Agency vs freelancer vs in-house — which is right?
Freelancer for one narrow task, in-house for daily ownership, agency for a full channel or fast scaling. Many ecommerce brands mix all three.
How do I get the most out of a marketing agency?
Share your real growth goals, join strategy discussions, and bring your own tools and competitor benchmarks to the table — don't just hand it over and hope.
