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Ask HN: Outsourcing marketing

5 points by bberenberg ↗ HN
I'm handling the business and tech side of my new company. Zero experience in marketing, and my current efforts have shown to be mediocre at best. I have been looking at bringing in a contractor for part time stuff, but was also considering going with an outsourced marketing firm. Would love to hear feedback from how others have managed the situation. And if you found a particularly helpful marketing team, if you could share a link I would appreciate it. Thanks <3

5 comments

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cm2012
Hire a contractor to help you learn the ropes/make a plan. I don't recommend an oursourced firm until you have a firm product market fit.
danieltillett
Are you sure you need marketing and not sales help?
Gustomaximus
Marketing is a broad field and disciplines have different involvement/relationships to how work is done. Plus your company situations etc... so broad caveat that this is limited information answer.

I'd be inclined to recommend someone part-time/contract if you have a reasonably narrow or marketing skillets required. Mainly for 1) You'll probably get better rates going direct vs a company that has to layer a margin on-top. 2) If your company grows its easier to bring in a person contributing to your success than if they are contracted to a larger company.

If you need broad marketing skill-sets, then a agency may be better. They can co-ordinate work across the many people within their agency. If you do go a firm/agency I would really recommend being careful you dont get their talent pitching you, then the work is handed to the cheap drone. This is a problem in many agencies.

Most importantly, do you know what marketing work you need?

grizzles
I think of outsourcing marketing as a competitive process. The goal is to find the marketer that can get you the lowest customer acquisition cost per marketing dollar spent. That is the only thing that matters.

So I typically get a group of prospective marketers and ask each one how they'd spend (eg. $1000), de-duplicate and then do what they suggest. I give the business to the one who's campaign gave the best results.

This doesn't guarantee you will get the marketer that will get you the best results. It does guarantee you will find the one with the best intuition for the next step in your marketing process improvement. Rinse repeat every few months.

As an aside, for DIYers, I think Google is back on top. Their AI efforts are having a huge impact on their ability to surface relevant ads. A DIYer can approximate what the big brands are doing with Smart Goals and Automated Insights.

The process I described above is kind of like a single step in an ai type optimization process to find the global maximum of your marketing spend.

ecesena
I can send you my recommendation but would prefer dm. You can ping me via email (in my profile), or just lmk how can I reach you.