15 Signs You Need to Hire a Marketing Agency in 2025

A whopping 73% of small businesses lack confidence in the effectiveness of their marketing strategies. An additional 78% of businesses say their failures can be pinpointed to their marketing plans. 

Fortunately, you don’t have to be a marketing expert or hire an entire department to succeed. Hiring a marketing agency is the easiest way to access top-level talent for a fraction of the cost. 

That’s why roughly half of all businesses have outsourced marketing tasks to agencies. 

This can feel like a big step for many brands. So before you work with an agency, you should verify that you actually need one. 

If you’re experiencing any of these 15 signs, then working with a marketing agency makes sense for your business. And if you’re nodding your head yes to several of these signs, then you really need to hire a marketing agency. 

1. Lack of Dedicated Marketing Resources

It’s a huge problem if you can’t clearly define roles in your marketing department. Even if you’re a smaller company that doesn’t have a full marketing team, you should at least be able to articulate who is responsible for what marketing tasks.

In a recent survey, 56% of small businesses say they only have one hour per day (or less) to spend on marketing efforts. 

How can you expect to compete with companies that have a team of marketing experts working 40+ hours each and targeting the exact same customers as you? It’s not possible. 

2. Competitors Are Outranking You in Search Results

If you Google keywords related to your business and your competitor’s websites appear higher than yours, it’s a big problem. This is especially true for local or “near me” searches.

You can hire a marketing agency to perform SEO services for your business. 

From keyword research to content creation, on-page SEO, technical SEO, and beyond, there are dozens of tasks that you can lean on a marketing agency for. Agencies can help you climb the SERPs and ultimately outrank your competition. 

3. Leads Are Down

Lots of people may use sales volume as an indication of success or failure. But sales don’t always tell the whole story—especially when it comes to marketing efforts.

Leads are more directly correlated to marketing campaigns, particularly for online businesses and SaaS products. 

If the number of leads in your sales pipeline has decreased or there’s a significant drop off in lead quality, it’s a signal that you’re having problems with marketing. 

The best marketing agencies can first help you identify those problems and then come up with a solution for driving quality leads through your funnel. 

4. You Don’t Have a Clear Plan

Just 61% of businesses have a documented content marketing plan, which means that roughly 4 out of 10 companies do not.

This number drops to 51% for businesses with less than 20 employees. 

Marketing plans are crucial for success. They’re the backbone of your campaigns and the north star for all marketing efforts. 

Without one, you can’t expect to succeed—and worse, you can probably expect to blow through your budget without real returns.

About 57% of businesses with a documented marketing plan say their content marketing strategies are successful. But just 21% of businesses without a plan believe they’re succeeding. 

5. Your Website is Outdated

Most experts agree that web designs should be updated every 18-24 months. I’m willing to give you a little more wiggle room here, depending on your business size and industry.

But if you haven’t updated your website in three or more years, then you need to get on this ASAP.

Your site design is closely tied to both SEO and CRO. So if you haven’t updated it in a while, I can almost guarantee you’re not getting as much organic traffic as you could be, and you’re definitely not converting users at a high rate.

Find a marketing agency with design resources to help you navigate your website refresh so it can be done through the right lens. 

6. Marketing Campaigns Aren’t Generating a Positive ROI

Are your marketing campaigns actually leading to dollars? If so, are those dollars more than what you’re spending on the campaign?

For those of you answering “no” to either or both of these questions, it’s a major sign that you need some help.

Dozens of marketing campaigns are highly profitable. For example, the average ROI for email marketing campaigns is 3600%. So if you’re somehow losing money in a category like this, then it’s definitely worth paying an agency to ensure you’re not bleeding your budget without getting anything back. 

7. Your Business is Growing Faster Than You Imagined

Not all signs that you need to work with a marketing agency are bad. Fast growth is obviously good, but you may need some help to accommodate the additional volume.

Maybe you have just one or two people currently handling marketing tasks. Those resources obviously have a ceiling. Rather than trying to force those people to do more work (which often leads to quality problems), you can outsource certain marketing responsibilities to an agency.

This can help you scale faster while continuing to do what’s been working well for your business and contributing to its growth. 

8. You Don’t Truly Understand Your Customers

It’s impossible to have quality marketing results if you don’t know who to target. But defining your target audience is really just the first step.

You need to truly understand your customer’s wants, needs, and behaviors to drive conversions. That’s why audience research is the most important tactic for successful marketing campaigns. 

Deep research will help you craft the perfect campaigns to target those specific people, and a marketing agency can handle this stuff on your behalf. 

9. You Have Inconsistent Branding Across Channels

Your website, social media profiles, email campaigns, videos—essentially everything you produce, needs to have the same branding elements.

I’m shocked to see something as simple as two different company logos being used between an Instagram and Facebook account. And this is just barely scratching the surface.

Some brands have a major disconnect between their brand voice and marketing positioning—particularly from channel to channel. This is usually because they’re using multiple people for different tasks. 

For example, the person writing your landing page copy may not be writing your emails or managing your social media pages. But if this branding isn’t aligned, it almost feels like three completely different voices and companies as you go from channel to channel. 

This is a major problem, as prospects typically need multiple touchpoints before they convert. If those touches aren’t consistent, then your brand messaging won’t resonate with them and the chances of turning them into a customer will drop significantly. 

10. You’re Not Adequately Tracking Performance Data

Planning and executing marketing campaigns is only half of the battle. But are those campaigns successful and yielding the results you’re looking for?

If you’re struggling to answer that question, I’m going to assume you either don’t know which data to track or you don’t have tracking systems in place.

Marketing agencies can help identify the KPIs that matter most for each campaign and then track those results to ensure you make data-backed decisions moving forward. 

11. You’re Planning a New Product Release or Major Brand Update

Any time you have a significant product update or release on the horizon, it’s best to consult with a marketing expert to help maximize the exposure.

For example, maybe your plans are worthy of some PR campaigns. Or maybe you can even start using influencers to build hype prior to the release date. 

Obviously, this stuff is all use-case-specific. But for such an important business decision, you don’t want to take chances and risk having no exposure to something you’ve spent a ton of time and money on. 

12. Lack of Marketing Skills and Expertise

If you were running a restaurant, would you promote a bartender to head chef if they had no cooking experience? I sure hope not.

But this is something that I see all too often with businesses. They have a great employee who does something really well, and they just assume that person can also succeed in a marketing role. 

Web designers can’t necessarily handle your development needs. Great copywriters can’t always build logical lead flows. Solid keyword research doesn’t translate to the technical side of SEO.

You need to make sure you have the right people in place—people who have the skills and experience required to do things properly. If you don’t have those resources in-house, then working with a marketing agency is the next logical choice. 

13. It’s Too Expensive to Hire New Employees

Many of you have already recognized the need for help on your marketing team. But hiring employees isn’t cheap. 

Research suggests that it costs an average of $4,700 per employee—just on hiring expenses (like job ads and recruiting). Once you factor in costs associated with training, development, and retention, this jumps closer to $12,000. 

Oh yeah, and we haven’t even talked about their salary yet. Even if you have tens of thousands of dollars in your budget for a new hire, make sure you multiply that by 1.25 or 1.40 to estimate the true cost of that position per year. 

You need to account for PTO, benefits, taxes—the list goes on and on. If you’re lucky, this person will be productive, stay on board, and you won’t have to replace them within the next 6-12+ months. If you do, expect to pay for all of this again.

Instead, you can just hire a marketing agency for a fraction of the cost.

You won’t have to worry about all of these unnecessary expenses, and there’s virtually no learning curve on their end. They can be productive and start making a positive impact on day one. 

14. You Want to Expand Your Reach Across New Marketing Channels

Success on one marketing channel doesn’t always continue on another, especially if you’re starting from scratch. 

For example, maybe you have a really solid business blog, Facebook page, and email list. But now you want to expand your reach through podcasts, YouTube videos, and TikTok.

Each of those additional channels is its own beast entirely. Your current team may not know how to navigate them, and your content production flow will look completely different. 

Rather than trying to guess your way through this process, you can work with an agency that already has a blueprint for success. 

15. You Feel Lost

Sometimes you just have that gut feeling that you’re in over your head. There’s no shame in admitting this and getting help.

Maybe you’re reviewing a marketing dashboard and just can’t make sense of the numbers. Or maybe you’re trying to plan a strategy for the upcoming quarter and don’t know where to start. 

Whatever the case may be, we all know that “lost” feeling, and it’s definitely a sign that you should hire a marketing agency.

Contact our team here at McDougall Interactive for a free marketing strategy session. We’ll assess your needs and determine if you actually need to hire a marketing agency and if we can help. With nearly three decades of experience, there’s a good chance we have a marketing service that fits your needs.

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