Digital Marketing Agency or DIY?
Updated: May 5, 2023

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Where would your business be if it weren’t for marketing? With Americans spending about 24 hours online every week on average, digital marketing is especially important for building your customer base.
Not sure whether to go the DIY route or hire a professional digital marketing agency? Take a look at these pros and cons for both options!
1. Quality Assurance

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DIY Pros:
You have direct control over the quality of the digital marketing materials and tools you use through the power of choice.
When you’re directly responsible for sourcing your digital marketing materials, you can rest easy knowing they’re available when you need them.
DIY Cons:
Even though you know what you want, you might not know which tools and materials are the best to use - or even how to use them properly.
Because you’re directly responsible for sourcing your digital marketing materials, it’s easy to become complacent and leave things to the last minute - anathema to digital marketing quality and success.
Agency Pros:
All that experience you’d otherwise need to gain or hire, professional digital marketing agencies like Parrot Digital Marketing already have.
Agencies don’t only know how best to use digital marketing tools, they also know where to find the best ones and have internal quality control systems in place.
No matter your business size, an agency has better experience and leverage in engaging structured, professional service providers to offer you uninterrupted servicing and niche expertise.
When it comes to sourcing internal information to be used in your digital marketing campaign, knowing you need to provide that information to an outside team adds a level of accountability to ensure you don’t grow complacent. Similarly, the agency’s internal quality control systems assure you they won’t grow complacent either.
Agency Cons:
Part of giving up direct control over the process means, when you hire a professional agency, it can take some time and several meetings before your exact vision is executed.
2. Structure

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DIY Pros:
You already know and understand your business’s structure.
DIY Cons:
Unfortunately, this also means you might be too close to the situation to have a truly objective, digital-marketing-focused view of areas that can and should be improved.
Agency Pros:
Agency team members are able to work on your digital marketing campaign from the perspective of your target market, as well as understand how business structures work as a general rule.
Additionally, because we’re not part of your in-house team, our digital marketing experts are able to take an objective view in your best interests.
Agency Cons:
If you see and treat the digital marketing agency as a Plan B or back-up solution, rather than as a business partner, you can sabotage their efforts.
3. Results

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DIY Pros:
When you’re doing your own digital marketing, you know it’s in your own best interests to try your utmost to achieve the best possible results, which can be a huge productivity incentive.
You’ll get to see the results first-hand, which can further boost productivity.
DIY Cons:
Because you might not have prior experience and/or training, you might not understand the best way to maximize the results of your efforts - or how best to streamline those efforts so you’re working smart rather than hard.
Additionally, unless you have a designated internal marketing team, your digital marketing efforts are going to cut into time you could and should be spending on other areas of your business.
Thirdly, without prior experience/training, you won’t have the necessary analytics skills for determining the success level of your digital marketing efforts (leading back to quality assurance issues).
Agency Pros:
A good agency proves its worth by being results-driven. At Parrot Digital Marketing, we know the secret to building long-term clientele - and we’re not afraid to share that knowledge and experience with our clients.
As part of our skillset and offered services, we conduct, provide, and explain analytics reports, as well as give recommendations on areas for improvement.
Because we have a team working on your digital marketing, we can take the workload - there’s less pressure on you, so you can focus on other aspects of your business.
Agency Cons:
You won’t be an agency’s only client, which does mean one team will be working on more than one company’s digital marketing. However, it’s the hallmark of an agency that they’re able to do so without compromising on quality.
DIY Digital Marketing vs. Digital Marketing Agency: Final Considerations

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As you can see, hiring a professional digital marketing agency like Parrot Digital Marketing eliminates all of the cons of the DIY route without losing all of the benefits.
And even though there are some unique cons to hiring an agency, these are far easier to overcome than those of DIY digital marketing!
Of course, there’s one last consideration: cost.
DIY Pros:
You can cut on direct costs by doing your own digital marketing.
DIY Cons:
Indirect costs - including loss of productivity in other areas, time, and energy, extra office equipment, etc. - make DIY digital marketing less cost-efficient than it seems at first.
Agency Pros:
The same indirect effects that make DIY digital marketing financially inefficient makes hiring a professional agency more cost-efficient.
Agency Cons:
On the flip side, an agency will be directly more costly than DIY digital marketing. You’ll need to weigh up the pros and cons to determine how much so.
Still not convinced? Reach out to us for a free marketing consultation, no strings attached!
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