Choosing Between an Agency or Freelancer

When it comes to creating powerful, effective content, there are many options. You can hire a freelancer, contract out your projects to an individual or team, or use a creative agency. Each option has its own strengths and weaknesses. With so many choices, it can be hard to decide which one is right for you and your project. Read on to learn more about the benefits of using a creative agency compared to a freelancer or contract hire. 

Working with a Creative Agency 

When you choose to work with a creative agency, you unlock access to experienced professionals who understand the industry inside and out. A good creative agency will have an entire team of writers, designers, photographers, videographers, web developers, and strategists who will collaborate to bring your project to life in the most effective way possible. The collective knowledge and experience of these professionals means that your project will be well-crafted from every angle—from strategy through execution. Having access to an entire team with diverse skills, for usually the cost of one or two employees, has its benefits.

In addition to having access to experienced professionals, working with an agency affords you the opportunity for scalability. Let’s say that your company needs help launching a new product over the course of several months or even years—you don’t want just one person working on this project; you need an entire team that can take on different elements as needed and scale up or down depending on what’s needed at any given time. An agency is well-equipped for this kind of situation; they have resources available when needed, but they also understand how important it is not to waste resources when they aren't necessary. This kind of scalability makes them much more cost-effective than hiring freelancers or contract hires for each component of your project separately. Most directors and managers don’t have time to coordinate multiple freelancers and connect them if a project demands multiple disciplines.

When working with an agency, the benefit to having an entire creatively staffed team to bolster your own organization without having to manage or absorb the Human Resources costs for those employees can be a huge benefit to businesses who work alongside agencies. 

Working with a Freelancer

Working with freelancers or individual contractors has its advantages — mainly cost-effectiveness — but it also has its drawbacks as well. Freelancers tend to specialize in one particular area only, which means that if you need help with multiple components (as most projects do), then you will need multiple people working on it separately — meaning less collaboration between different areas and potentially more conflicts among those involved in the project due to too many cooks in the kitchen! Additionally, communication can become complicated when dealing with multiple people from different locations at once — something that agencies are better equipped for due to their centralized structure and established process flows between departments. Freelancers usually are more specialized in their field, which at times can be a unique benefit as well. When all that freelancer does is design for example, they will have specialized, focused skill in that discipline – bringing potentially a more specialized solution to your needs and problems.

Conclusion

Choosing between working with an agency versus working directly with  freelancers is all about finding what works best for your individual circumstances — both financially and creatively speaking. But if you’re looking for high quality work done efficiently by experienced professionals who understand how all aspects of content creation fit together like puzzle pieces - then working with an agency might be just what you need! Whichever route you choose, we believe in both the agency and freelance model. We support many local freelancers and often send work directly to them when it’s a better fit! At the end of the day, choose the solution that solves your problems best.

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