What Should You Look For When Choosing a Marketing Agency For Your Startup?

Browse through Twitter or LinkedIn, and you'll see examples of them everywhere: one-person marketing teams. Often underpaid and overworked, one-person internal marketing teams generally "wear multiple hats" and "juggle a wide range of tasks." Not only are they expected to keep the company website up to date, but they're also meant to be social media marketing experts, professional photographers, email marketing pros, and content development powerhouses.

Whether you yourself have been the one-person marketing team or you've hired one, chances are you know this isn't a recipe for success. You may have even started searching for a startup marketing agency to help bolster your marketing efforts.

Working with a full-service digital marketing agency can be a great way to help accelerate your success. But unless you pick your marketing partner strategically, you may end up just spinning your wheels. Here's how to pick an agency that will actually drive your business goals forward — rather than simply blowing your marketing budget.

Work with a team that can tackle your business objectives — not just provide you with a service

For years, agencies have serviced clients who are looking to outsource specific tasks. You might think of going to a digital agency with a certain request, such as:

• "We want to refresh our branding."
• "We need a content strategy and some search engine optimization work done on our site."
• "We need someone to handle our social media posts for us, boost our following, and increase engagement."
• "We're hosting this epic event in four weeks.... can you help?"

Since these requests easily fall within the range of digital marketing services offered by agencies, many will simply take the work, deliver, and stop there.

But we believe that you shouldn't be working with agencies this way.

Unless you have a robust, in-house marketing team that has a strong marketing plan, business experience, and the ability to carry out  creative services in-house, you may not actually know what you need. Your hired gun may schedule a full month of beautiful social media posts or plan a riveting event — but what you actually need is a business partner who will tell you when:

• Your branding isn't the problem.
• Content marketing won't deliver the best ROI for your business.
• You're engaging with your audience through the wrong social media platform.
• An event isn't the best way to generate interest in your business.

If you're looking to scale your startup's marketing, don't hire a content marketing agency or a design agency to carry out specific tasks. Hire a business partner who can analyze your business goals and help you land on what marketing strategies actually make sense for your goals. Then — and only then — should they get to work on building out their campaigns.

Hire a team that acts as your internal marketing team — not an external hired gun

At Craze, we've carefully crafted our business model so that it allows us to work with clients as if we were their internal marketing team — not an external agency hired to deliver specific marketing campaigns. Many of our clients say this sounds "too good to be true."

But it's not clever marketing — it just comes down to how we've structured our team, our pricing, and our processes.

1. We work with a full-stack team and dedicated marketing managers.

Here at Craze, our team is our most valuable asset — and we hire knowing that we need highly skilled hustlers. Our teams are made up of photographers, videographers, email marketing experts, social media mavens, and more, all of whom have extensive experience and have worked with brands like Amazon, Google, Instagram, Twitter, Discord, Bumble, Airbnb, and Universal.

Each team is run by a dedicated Marketing Manager who oversees the larger group. They act as the quarterback of each team and ultimately are the ones who communicate directly with clients. They dive deep into our clients' business objectives, come up with strategies to meet those goals, and bring in the appropriate team members as needed.

Efficiency is a massive part of our culture, and we believe that when you have clearly stated deliverables, you can get work done in a fraction of the time. A copywriter can write all the social media captions in a 30 day calendar while they provide artistic direction to the design team to fill spots. A media team can create reels, retouch photos, and turn captured content into dynamic pieces for followers to enjoy. Paid ads teams can monitor campaigns and map out future projects.

A small business or startup may not be able to afford a full stack marketing team. But four to five startups that complement each other within the Craze framework can. 

2. Our pricing allows you to get full-stack services for the price of a single hire.

Our pricing starts at $5,000 a month and scales from there depending on a startup's individual needs. This allows our clients to get full-stack services — such as content production, social media management, and copywriting — for the price of a single hire per year (around $60,000).

Of course, depending on each startup's needs, our prices can rise. Some startups have niche needs — like an e-commerce brand that needs hundreds of paid ads managed and monitored daily or a company that needs to run robust influencer campaigns each month. In certain cases, pricing can go up to $30,000 a month.

However, the vast majority of our clients work at the lower end of our pricing scale and see the results they need.

3. We invest in technology that scales our work.

As part of our commitment to delivering results efficiently, we work with best-in-class tools that allow our team members to deliver better work faster. For a single startup, working with a full suite of products — including Monday, Hootsuite, Google Analytics, Klaviyo, MailChimp, Frame.io, and more — would be prohibitively expensive. But since we work with multiple clients, these costs work for our team and allow us to scale our work.

In the future, we plan to push even further with our technology. We're currently investing in our own proprietary tool that will allow us to combine and eliminate many of the SaaS tools we currently use, streamlining our work even further into one all-encompassing suite.

Work with a startup marketing agency that delivers results

We truly believe that startups will only succeed when they work with business partners that are equally invested in their success. That's why we're reachable at all times — through weekly calls, Slack, phone calls, and email — and carefully monitor our clients' results to make sure we're driving results. If we're not, we work with you to switch tactics until we find the right fit. Your success is our success.

To learn more about the Craze team and how it can help your startup, reach out to our team. We'll be in touch shortly for a free consulting call.

‍