Running a campaign on the web requires the preparation of a specific digital marketing plan – one of its elements is to choose between a marketing agency and a freelancer employment. Both solutions have their advantages, so how to choose the right one? As you can guess, a lot depends on how you want the campaign to look and what to expect from it.

The marketing agency is the best choice when planning a campaign, that will use many communication channels at once – thanks to appropriate contacts and skills, an agency is able to prepare advertising materials and ads that will reach a potential client from several possible sources. In contrast, marketing freelancers and cheaper and they deal greatly with smaller, precisely defined projects, for example, related to graphics creation, translations, copywriting, etc.

Strengths of marketing agencies

When you pick a digital marketing agency, you can be sure that a specialist will take care of your campaign. This means that employees with the most appropriate qualifications are delegated to a specific job (eg a PPC specialist for Google Ads campaigns). The client is therefore sure that his campaign is not prepared by a student that is still learning, with whom we often identify freelancers. An important plus of marketing agencies is that the work will be carried out in a systematic and reliable manner. In addition, we are dealing here with a multi-level verification of the created content, thanks to which we receive a ready product, which probably will not need to be amended. Formally, the difference is also the fact that an online marketing or interactive agency is a company, that is, it will issue an invoice – whereas freelancers often work on the basis of a contract for a specific work.

When to choose a freelancer?

First, let’s deal with the image of a freelancer as a rookie in the industry looking for first experiences. Often these are experienced marketers who after years of working in marketing agencies, decided to run a business. Freelancers are creators who can boast of their own portfolio – in the case of choosing an agency, we are not sure whether the employee whose content we liked will be responsible for preparing and running our campaign on the web. However, the main advantage of freelancers is definitely the lower price of the service. If you hire a group of specialists from a marketing agency, the final price includes eg administrative costs. In addition, the final effect is preceded by many meetings, which additionally affect the cost, but also the waiting time. Cooperation with a freelancer is more profitable in this respect for those who are hoping for a quick execution of the order. In addition, they don’t bear costs such as maintaining the office – which affects the price.

This dilemma is not that simple and requires a thorough rethinking of own expectations, regarding the shape of the digital campaign. The ideal solution would probably be the combination of freelance prices and the quality of marketing agencies. This was the basic idea when creating the Adlancers – polish marketing agency. Working and managing many complex marketing projects, at earlier stages of our career, we saw the pros and cons of cooperation with both marketing agencies and specialized freelancers. We decided to use this experience to create a hybrid which is a marketing agency made up of freelancers who perform various tasks for their clients on a daily basis. The flat structure and high level of specialization help us in standing out from other agencies, in which a significant part of the tasks is carried out by people without experience in digital marketing. Undoubtedly, these assumptions are crucial for the results and effectiveness of the campaigns we create.