Promoting your pest control business is no mean feat, even if you consider the fact that pest control is an essential service and everyone requires it now and again. One could argue that when you’re promoting something as basic as pest control, you’ll need to go the extra mile to get creative as opposed to promoting a unique product or service. In other words, there’s no denying that it requires special skills to market a pest control firm.
Now, when developing a marketing strategy for your pest control business, you’ll need to address several questions. We’d say the first question you should address is whether you need to hire a marketing agency or rely on your existing marketing department. Therefore, in this post, we’ll take you through the factors you’ll need to take into account before you decide on the same.
Experience
This is a no-brainer, if your in-house marketing department does not consist of employees with the necessary experience to design and launch a successful marketing campaign, you may be better off hiring an agency. Marketing agencies that enjoy a great reputation (and pretty much any business that enjoys a great reputation) are more than likely to have had years of experience backing them up. Therefore, it logically follows that they’d possess a better understanding of how viewers respond to different marketing techniques and campaigns – both offline and online.
The experience that accompanies these agencies also allows them to save on time when it comes to designing an ad campaign. If your marketing department is inexperienced, it may take time to figure out the specifics of what would and wouldn’t work to promote your business. An agency on the other hand has gone through years of trial and error, testing different ads to see what works best for converting clicks to sales.
Besides, marketing agencies likely deal with various industries, not just pest control. This allows them to get creative and use marketing techniques that they’ve used to design ads for other businesses to create great ads for yours. I guess you could say that their varied experience gives them a broader perspective of how advertising works and how you can make the most of it – something that an internal marketing department may be lacking.
Knowledge
One of the biggest advantages of opting for an in-house marketing department over a marketing agency is that the former has specialist knowledge of the industry you’re operating in. It’s quite apparent that an employee at your firm would have better knowledge of your services, practices, targets, and more as compared to a marketing agency. Think about it, wouldn’t an employee that works for your firm day in and day out and observes all your operations be better equipped to design your ad campaign than a large agency that would likely create a generic ad for you?
Besides, it would be easier for you to exercise control over the creative process with an internal marketing department than you could with an agency. After all, agencies have various clients and it’s not likely that they’ll give you the time of day whenever you want to weigh in and play a role in designing your ad campaign. Your marketing department on the other hand consists of your employees that would report to you and seek your approval during each step of the process if that’s what you want.
Cost
This is an important consideration when it comes to every aspect of marketing, not just when you’re thinking of outsourcing your marketing functions. As I mentioned earlier, pest control is an essential service which means you don’t need a fancy, expensive ad campaign to entice users, just ads that are enough to help you stand out. All a user wants from a pest control firm is – you guessed it – pest control. The average user doesn’t care about the kind of graphics you use in your ads or how much you paid a PPC expert to write the ad, all they want to know is whether your service is reliable and why they should hire you instead of another pest control firm.
Granted, this is not as simplistic as I’ve made it sound, but the point I’m trying to make here is that you don’t have to go all out and splurge to have an effective marketing campaign for your pest control business. Therefore, you’ll need to weigh the cost of using an internal marketing department against that of hiring a marketing agency. Generally speaking, the cost of hiring an agency is more flexible than hiring a team of employees to power your department.
You can hire an agency depending on your specific needs during different times of the year rather than pay salaries all year round to a group of employees. However, this, in turn, depends on the number of employees you want to hire and the agency you’re interested in. If you’re going to opt for a high-profile agency that’ll provide you with an elaborate advertising campaign, it may just be more cost-effective to set up an internal marketing department with a few employees instead.
Effort
I mentioned earlier that using an internal marketing department gives you better control over your ad campaign. What I neglected to mention is that this is a double-edged sword. You could find yourself spending more time and effort on your marketing campaign than it’s worth, especially if you end up being pulled into every small decision your marketing department has to take during the creative process.
In such a scenario, it’s easy to see why it would just be easier to delegate this responsibility to a marketing agency and let them deal with the specifics of creating ads for you. After all, they’ve got the skills and expertise required for the same. This is true unless the agency in question has no experience whatsoever in designing ads for pest control firms. If this is the case, you may be left with no choice but to get yourself involved with the creative process anyway.
But what if you hired an agency that has the necessary experience and niche knowledge regarding your pest control business? We offer you exactly that – we can assign you a team of experts that would not only design great ads for you but also see that these ads can appeal to your consumer base in the most effective ways. Therefore, in conclusion, the choice between an internal marketing department and a marketing agency for your pest control business is dependent on your needs, budget, and much more. You would be ill-advised to make a hasty decision here that could cost you in terms of money and effort so we’d recommend you take the aforementioned factors into account before you decide.
