You need leads.
The right leads.
The kind of leads that turn into customers.
We get it!
So, you're thinking about hiring a lead generation company or marketing agency or staffing an in-house marketing team. Each is a viable solution, but that doesn't mean they are all viable solutions for your business right now.
So, which one would be the best fit? In this post, we'll cover the differences between these approaches, then cover how you can make the best decision for your growing business.
Lead Generation Companies vs. Marketing Agencies
Most business owners don't understand the differences between a lead generation company and a marketing agency. There's a lot of overlap, and the terminology isn't always well-defined, but there are a few crucial differences you'll want to wrap your mind around.
Let's start by briefly covering the different services each of these agencies tend to offer, and exploring the pros and cons of those offerings.
Lead Generation Companies vs. Marketing Agencies: Core Offerings
While both lead generation companies and marketing agencies aim to grow your business, they offer distinct services. Understanding these differences is crucial to making the right choice for your company's needs.
Lead Generation Companies typically offer:
- Email campaigns: Targeted outreach to potential customers
- Telemarketing: Cold calling to reach prospects directly (though this approach is less and less common over time)
- Web form optimization: Designing landing pages to capture lead information
- Paid advertising management: Utilizing platforms like Google Ads for quick lead acquisition
Marketing Agencies, particularly those focused on inbound marketing, offer a broader range of services, often including email, paid ads, and web form optimization offered by lead gen companies. They also tend to offer:
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Improving your website's visibility in search results
- Content marketing: Creating valuable content to attract and engage your target audience
- Social media marketing: Building and managing your brand's social media presence
- PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising: Managing paid ad campaigns across various platforms
- Marketing Automation: Implementing tools to streamline and scale your marketing efforts
- Analytics and Reporting: Tracking performance and providing actionable insights
But offerings aren't the only differences between these two service providers. There are also some key differences in terms of approach, scope, and mindset. Let's explore some of those differences in more detail.
Short-Term vs. Long-Term Focus
Lead generation companies tend to be short-term focused. They secure business based on a promise to deliver leads quickly. This means they'll be buying a lot of traffic with display (banner) or text search ads. That's understandable, and if you want an instant influx of leads, that's the way to do it. You'll see a nice bump quickly, but it tends to level off quickly as well.
One of the drawbacks of this approach is that as soon as you stop paying, no matter which lead generation pricing model you choose, the pipeline runs dry.
An Inbound Marketing Agency, on the other hand, will be less concerned with a short-term fix and more concerned with building a self-sustaining lead generation ecosystem for the long-term. A significant component of this strategy is posting content on your website which ranks high on Google and brings in qualified Organic search traffic.
Building content and ranking in search engines takes a little time but provides more value down the road. It's like planting a garden. You won't see sprouts the next day, but if you plant more seed and water the garden regularly, you will see abundant fruit in due time.
Our clients see compounding results month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year.
To sum up:
Lead Generation Companies typically measure success by:
- Number of leads generated
- Cost per lead
- Lead quality or qualification rate
- Short-term conversion rates
These metrics focus on immediate results and are great for businesses needing a quick influx of potential customers.
Marketing Agencies use a broader set of metrics:
- Website traffic growth
- Search engine rankings for key terms
- Engagement rates (time on site, pages per session)
- Conversion rates across the entire funnel
- Customer lifetime value
- Brand awareness and sentiment
- Long-term ROI
Baseball fan? Think of it this way...
Lead Generation Companies do a lot of mid-season free agency deals and pay no attention to the farm system.
Marketing Agencies are like the Braves organization of the 1990s. They invested heavily in the minor leagues in the early 90s and proceeded to win more pennants than any other club later in the decade.
I lived through the less-than-glory days as a Braves fan in the 80s, so this analogy gets me all misty-eyed. I heart you, Sid Bream.
Manual vs. Automated Lead Qualification
Another distinction is that lead generation companies will dip a little deeper into the sales end of the customer journey. Lead generation companies often interact with prospects one-on-one to qualify them before handing off to your sales team.
Inbound Marketing agencies will work to refine an automated lead scoring and qualification system without directly communicating one-on-one with prospects. The advantage of this approach is that it is easier and less expensive to scale as the traffic begins to snowball.
This distinction, again, points to the difference in short-term (lead generation company) and long-term (inbound marketing agency) focus.
It's kind of like the difference between the early Yahoo search engine and Google. Yahoo's rankings were built on a manual process where humans decided what was good and what wasn't. Cool idea, but it doesn't scale well. Google used algorithms and let the computers do the work under their guidance.
Google had the obvious scale advantage, and we see how things turned out in the long run.
The Pros & Cons Of Building Your Own Team
Another option, of course, is building your own marketing team of FTEs (Full-Time Employees). This can be a good long-term approach, but you are most likely going to see a negative ROMI in the short and mid-term.
One of the Pros is that you get to make it your own. You'll be in complete control of recruiting, training, and managing your team. If it goes well, you'll end up with a group of highly specialized marketers who know your industry and brand really, really well.
Related Read: Hiring an Outsourced Marketing Team: 3 Biggest Benefits & Risks
Another Pro is that you'll be developing your own processes and infrastructure. If this part goes well, you'll bend a marketing automation platform to your will and refine internal processes so that your marketing systems run like an Italian sports car. (We'd name one in particular, but you probably think Lamborghinis are better than Maseratis and you'd be woefully unenlightened.)
But those same Pros can be Cons. You'll have the burden (financial and time) of recruiting, training, and managing your own FTEs. And you'll probably take a lot of Vitamin I (ibuprofen) as you hammer out processes and master marketing automation on the fly.
A Middle Ground Approach
There is a hybrid approach which has worked well for several of our clients. You can start by leveraging an Inbound Marketing Agency and slowly build your own team.
Top inbound marketing agencies work as an extension of their clients' teams. That means they're very open about what happens behind the scenes as they work to grow your business. With that type of transparency (one of our seven core values), you reap the benefits of the team talent, software expertise, AND the systems and processes the agency already has in place.
Some of our clients keep us for the long-term, and some build their own team on the foundation we help them construct. We're totally fine with either.
Which Is Best For You?
A lot of large companies have investors who are demanding a quick return. If you're feeling the heat to see a big sales spike in the next month or two, go with a lead generation company.
If your company has deep pockets and a relentless DIY spirit, build your own team from scratch. You may be able to weather the short and mid-term negative ROMI and look like a champ a couple of years from now.
If your company is seeing some success (doesn't have to have a quick hit in the next 60 days) but needs to see bottom line improvements in the next 3 to 4 quarters and a sustainable long-term strategy, take a good look at an Inbound Marketing agency. If this approach is a possibility you'd like to consider, let's have a conversation.
To learn more about our methodology and steal some of our best plays for yourself, you can also check out our free resource, the Growth Playbook.
