5 Reasons Tech Founders Don’t Want to Work with Marketing Agencies (And Why Hiring an Agile Marketer is Key)
It’s an exciting time when your startup is ready to grow beyond its initial team and you’re ready to invest in marketing. With so many marketers out there, it can be a challenge to find the right one for your business, especially if you’re not quite ready to hire on a full-time marketing team. It might make sense to start working with a marketing agency or consulting firm who can help you with specific projects or even on a contract basis, but this can be a big mistake for startups that are used to an agile workflow.
What is Agile?
“The Agile methodology is a project management approach that involves breaking a project into phases and emphasizes continuous collaboration and improvement” (Atlassian). The cornerstone of Agile is a team that is well equipped to change their approach quickly should the need arise. It embodies flexibility, iteration, and adaptability to allow engineering teams to stay ahead of problems, new requirements, or changing priorities.
So, why are marketing agencies and consultants often the wrong choice for an agile team?
1. The Lengthy Proposal Process
For startups, time is of the essence. Unfortunately, the initial stages of working with marketing agencies can be marred by a prolonged and detailed proposal process. Before gaining a clear understanding of the time required and expected investment, startups can often find themselves waiting weeks for proposals to be created and shared. For an organization on a tight budget, it can be very frustrating to wait so long only to find out a particular consultant is far outside their budget. This often causes delays in crucial decision-making processes, hindering the momentum that startups need to thrive.
2. The Burden of Upfront Costs (Time and Money)
Once the proposal is finally in hand, startups can be surprised by the significant upfront cost associated with strategic work and the creation of a comprehensive marketing plan. This can be a financial hurdle for startups that are already operating within tight budgets, but also represents a huge loss of time that could be used towards their specific business goals rather than needless upfront branding and strategic overhauls.
3. Execution and Measurement Delays
Marketing agencies like to build in a lot of time for the execution of their plans. As a larger organization, they are not typically able to execute tactics as quickly as startups need them to be completed. It is not uncommon for the execution of project plans to take several weeks, and even longer for the measurement of those efforts. This means that you could spend up to several months before learning if the agency’s efforts are showing any signs of success. This impedes a startup’s need to accomplish things rapidly and adapt quickly.
4. Inflexibility in the Process
Flexibility is a hallmark of the agile methodology. Unfortunately, a lot of marketing agencies and consultants have set processes that they are unwilling to deviate from, even if it would benefit their client (you). In addition, agencies will often limit opportunities for feedback from the client in order to manage their own workload. While this might work fine for larger organizations, it is antithetical to the needs of many startups who expect to provide creative input and participate in collaborative discussions around their marketing efforts.
5. Lack of Transparency
A client typically has no insight into the progress of an agency’s project except for limited check-ins with an account executive or project manager. For an organization that thrives on active and ongoing collaboration, this lack of transparency can be exceptionally frustrating. Especially when that lack of transparency translates into unexpected use of the budget. It’s not uncommon for a client to find that a disproportionate amount of a project’s budget was used too early on in the process, and only when the monthly invoice has been sent. Startups rely on a constant feed of information, and often agencies and consultants do not live up to that expectation.
It’s not that a marketing agency or consultant is never the right fit for a startup, but it’s imperative that you get a good idea about a consultant’s workflow right at the start. It should be pretty clear that a consultant is willing to match your team’s workflows and adaptability before discussing specific projects and budgets. In addition, make sure you find a partner who is up front about their pricing and expected timelines even before drafting a formal proposal (even if it’s just a ballpark estimate). If it feels like someone is wasting your time during the project planning phase, it's a good insight into how the project execution will feel too.