5 alternatives to an online marketing agency (and when to choose which)

Hiring an online marketing agency is not the only way to make your advertising work, and often not the cheapest. There are five serious alternatives: a freelancer, having your own marketer trained, hiring a marketer, specialised agencies per channel, or doing it yourself with courses and tooling.

Below is the cost of each alternative, when it fits and when it doesn't. Including the situations in which we would say: choose one of these, and not us.

Why people are looking for alternatives

Almost always for one of these three reasons: the agency costs more than it delivers, the knowledge stays outside the organisation, or things move too slowly because every change has to go through an account manager.

Those are not complaints about agencies in general, they are signs that the model does not fit the situation. Which alternative works best depends on which of the three carries the most weight for you.

1. A freelance performance marketer

What it costs: on a freelance and entry-level typically 500 to 1,500 euros per month, for growing SMEs 1,500 to 5,000 euros. Hourly rates in the market range between 75 and 175 euros.

Whenever it suits: You want execution without overhead, have a clearly defined assignment and consider short lines of communication more important than continuity.

When not: if the channel is business-critical. If your freelancer falls ill, gets a larger client or quits, your advertising stops. At an agency you can absorb that, with a single person rarely.

Training your own marketer

What it costs: one-off. Our in-house training programme cost €7,500: six sessions over eight weeks. Add to that half a day to a full day a week from your marketer during those eight weeks.

Whenever it suits: You have someone in-house who really wants to run advertising themselves, there is a budget that can grow along with it, and your offer is already selling somewhere.

When not: if that person cannot free up the time, the process will grind to a halt halfway through, making this not the cheapest but the most expensive option. Neither is it suitable if you actually want to hand over management; in that case, you are buying an obligation rather than a solution.

3. Employing a marketer

What it costs: a salary plus employer's social contributions, alongside a recruitment process. Also count on onboarding time before someone becomes productive.

Whenever it suits: you structurally have enough work for a full-time role and want to keep the knowledge in-house permanently. With a media budget heading towards tens of thousands of euros a month, this almost always becomes the cheapest option per euro.

When not: with a small budget. Having someone steer a campaign of a few thousand euros a month full-time is an expensive way to optimise. And you are buying the knowledge of just one person: if they leave, you start all over again.

4. Channel-specific specialist agencies

What it costs: per agency comparable to a full-service agency, so you pay the base fee multiple times.

Whenever it suits: if one channel really delivers the lion's share of your turnover and you want the absolute best for it.

When not: as soon as you deploy multiple channels, the problem arises that nobody is monitoring the whole: each agency optimises its own channel, and the cross-channel customer journey belongs to nobody. We then frequently see the same person being approached by three parties at the same time, with three different messages.

5. Do it yourself with courses and tooling

What it costs: A day course or online course usually costs a few hundred to well over a thousand euros. On paper, the cheapest route.

Whenever it suits: your budget is still small, you want to understand how it works first, and you have time to learn from your own mistakes.

When not: if the costs of those mistakes are higher than the guidance. A campaign that is judged on the wrong metric for three months costs you the entire budget of those three months plus the conclusion that advertising doesn't work. That is the most expensive lesson there is, because that conviction sticks around afterwards.

How to choose

Three questions determine the answer almost completely.

• Is there someone with time every week? If not, training someone or doing it yourself are out of the question. Then you choose between a freelancer, an agency, or employing someone.
• How large is your media budget, and is it growing? Below about a thousand euros per month, an algorithm gets too little data to learn; we use around 1,250 euros as a lower limit. Above ten thousand per month, having your own marketer soon becomes logical.
• Should the knowledge remain inside? If so, outsourcing and standalone channel agencies are out of the question, no matter how good they are.

When we say ourselves: choose an alternative

We do not take on clients if we think it is not going to work out. Specifically, we say no in the following cases:

• There is no proven proposition. Advertising amplifies what is already there; it does not create anything out of nothing. Invest in your proposition first.
• The budget cannot increase once the campaigns are running profitably. That way, you learn to build a channel that is subsequently not allowed to grow further.
• A final verdict is expected within six weeks. Depending on your decision-making cycle, it takes two to six months before you can say anything reliable.

In those situations, a day course, a freelancer for a defined job or simply waiting a bit longer is a better use of the same money.