When your business is ready to grow and you’re wanting to take your marketing more seriously, you’re often met with two options:
Hire a consultant/ freelancer
Bring on a marketing agency
Both sound like they should solve your problems, right? But in my experience, there’s a big gap between getting some help and getting the right help.
Let’s break down the differences between a marketing consultant vs agency, and why more and more businesses are choosing something else. Something…in between.
The Traditional View
Consultants are known for being flexible, experienced, and hands-on. You get their brain, their attention, and sometimes (often), their sleeves rolled up too. But they’re also usually one-person shows. Limited time with limited output. Great brains – less scale.
Agencies offer teams, structure, and a wider skill set. In theory, they can “do everything.” But they also come with overhead, hierarchy, and a tendency to treat clients like line items, not partners. You pay for senior expertise, and often get juniors doing the do. I’ve seen this way too often first hand. I’ve even been the junior this situation during my marketing agency days. As a junior, it was great for my experience, but not great value for the money for the clients I was serving.
Interestingly – and very understandably – most growing businesses don’t want either/or.
They want someone to own it. Plan it. Build it. But still be there when big decisions need making.
What most businesses really need
The gap between consultant and agency is exactly where most SMEs live. You’re too big to be DIY-ing your content calendar. Too busy to be briefing six different freelancers. But too clever to throw five grand a month at vague agency outputs.
What you need is:
Strategy that’s tailored to your business and your challenges/ goals
Execution that’s done well and that is pushing your towards your objectives (1% better every day)
Communication that feels like you’re in the loop at all times
And clear results that shows you what’s working and what impact it’s having on your business
In reality…
I say the whole marketing consultant vs agency debate is a bit of a false choice. Most growing businesses don’t need either in the traditional sense.
What they need is someone who’s committed, who gets stuck in, sees the bigger picture, and doesn’t disappear when the brief gets messy.
So What Should You Choose?
If you’re wondering which is better – a marketing consultant or an agency – here’s a more useful question to ask yourself:
What kind of support will get you where you want to go?
Do you need clarity? Capacity? Consistency? Not sure? Look at the Bearhat Marketing Benchmark >>
Do you want to delegate the whole thing, or co-create a plan and lead it with support?
We’ve worked with founders, COOs, and in-house teams who tried all the things – the freelancer juggle, the big agency, the strategy deck that they invested in but then it sat doing nothing.
They came to Bearhat because they needed someone who was on their side, they needed a partner.
A great example is the work we do with EZOO, where we lead on all things marketing – from setting the strategy to executing it across all of the channels – organic social, paid social, website, content, SEO, partnerships…(all the things!). The responsibility for all marketing is with us – including the success of the third parties we manage on their behalf.
So what is Bearhat?
We’re not a consultancy, but not a big agency, we’re a sweet middle ground. A mini marketing agency based near Birmingham and Coventry, built for growing businesses who don’t want to DIY – but want a team that feels like they’re on your side, agile, and invested.
We do strategy, content, planning, and performance…and we run it like it’s our own.
So take this time to ask yourself – how is your marketing currently performing? If you’re not sure what questions to ask to find out, take a look at the Bearhat Marketing Benchmark >> – it’s a 3 minute quiz that will show you where you could be falling down.
