5 simple reasons not to hurry to on-board low cost digital agencies
Being in a turbulent and testing financial time period, where the Digital Agencies mushrooming all over everyday, one will find themselves at their wits end to make a choice of which agency to onboard. Due to the recent budget cut-down across departments, the digital budget also takes a beating. This makes it a very tempting choice to go with an Agency with a very low cost proposal.
Before you rush down and finalise that offer just keep in mind the following points:
1. Credibility
Check the credibility of the Agency. Check their Social Media pages and look out for any negative comments that any client might have posted. Check their glass-door page, if you find negative reviews more than positive ones then it should ring alarm bells. Also check the brands that they work with and for how many years. Usually, the more the time a particular brand has been serviced more the credibility score.
2. Experience
Mostly the low cost agencies are newly formed by young stalwarts whose staff consists mainly of people with lesser experience. Experienced resources are always expensive to maintain which won’t be feasible for a low cost agency. Due to the people with lesser experience, there is a chance of not understanding the brief or the requirements or even understand your industry which may lead to the deliverables not matching your requirements or not up to the mark.
3. Your Bandwidth
Due to the staff with lesser experience in the agency, your personal bandwidth and/or your team member’s bandwidth will be utilised more as the learning curve and educating the agency people about your business and requirements will take much more time than a seasoned agency resource.
4. Scalability
Low cost agencies won’t be able to scale up operations quickly. For eg. if there is a video needed for the banner and your regular video production company can’t churn out the content, then this becomes a limitation of skills that a low-cost agency would have. In another scenario if you want the website timelines to be crunched suddenly due to market conditions, a mid-sized agency can do it easily or at least smoothly while the low cost agency will find it challenging to garner more resources for your project.
5. Resource crunch
Attrition is very high in low cost agencies. Due to the pressure of keeping the cost low, they usually hire less experienced or newly out of college/institute interns at very low salaries. Due to this the resource allocated for your project will keep on changing or may not be the best in the market. The resource, after acquiring some good skills, leave the company at the drop of a hat as soon as they get a better salary hike. Due to this the timelines and the quality of the deliverables will surely be affected.
Takeaway: Unless you have a really very low budget or low cost agency is known to you or any of your credible sources, always go for a renowned agency whose credibility has already been established. Of course you can definitely negotiate with the agency to match your budget.
Hi Pramod,
You have shared an informative post on hiring digital marketing agencies. Nowadays there are lot of digital agencies out there but out of them we have to check background credit, reliability as well as scalability of the agency to get the right direction.