Do I Need a Marketing Agency or a Marketing Strategist?

By Jim Butz, Founder of Anuncier, a growth strategist with 20+ years of experience helping businesses and nonprofits solve growth challenges through smarter digital marketing strategies.

You don't need to choose between an agency and a strategist. You need to figure out which one you're actually missing, and most small businesses have never asked themselves that question.

If you don't have a clear digital marketing strategy, hiring an agency to run campaigns is like hiring a contractor before you have blueprints. They'll build something. It might even look good. But nobody can tell you if it's the right thing for your business.

What a marketing strategist actually does

A marketing strategist looks at your business goals first and your tactics second. They figure out who your customers actually are, what makes your business different, and which channels are worth your time and budget. The output is a plan. Not a campaign, a plan.

Strategists are the ones asking why before how. Why are we targeting this audience? Why this channel over that one? Why now instead of next quarter? That thinking has to happen somewhere, whether you do it yourself, hire someone to do it, or skip it entirely and hope for the best.

Most businesses and nonprofits have some version of this already, even if it only lives in the owner's or executive's head. The gap shows up in the next step. A marketing strategy is one thing. Getting it to actually show up correctly across your website, your social channels, your ads, and everywhere else a customer runs into you online is another. That's the specific job of a digital marketing strategist: take the strategy you already have and make sure every digital channel is pulling in the same direction instead of running as disconnected tactics.

What a marketing agency actually does

An agency executes. Give them a brief and a budget, and they'll run the ads, write the content, manage the social calendar, and report back on performance. Agencies are built for output. Good ones are very good at it.

What agencies generally don't do is question whether the brief was right in the first place. That's not a knock on agencies. It's not their job. Their job is to build what you asked for, and do it well.

The gap most businesses fall into

Most small businesses and nonprofits skip the strategy step entirely. They hire an agency, hand over a vague goal like grow our online presence, and let the agency fill in the blanks. Six months later, the reporting looks busy. Impressions are up. Posts are going out. But nobody can say whether any of it is moving the business forward, because nobody defined what moving forward looks like.

This is the gap between activity and strategy. Tactics without a plan behind them are just expensive guesses.

How to tell which one you need

If you can clearly explain who you're targeting, what makes you different, and which channels matter most, and you just need someone to execute that plan, you need an agency. If you know all of that but your website doesn't say it, your social doesn't reflect it, and a stranger couldn't tell what makes you different from your listings alone, you need a digital marketing strategist to close that gap.

If you're not sure any of that is true, or if you have plenty of marketing activity happening but no one can say what it's actually accomplishing, you need strategy first. That might mean a strategist, a consultant, or a structured audit before you spend another dollar on execution.

Where Anuncier fits

This is exactly the gap we built Anuncier to close. We work with small businesses, startups, and nonprofits who have a strategy, even if it's informal, but don't know how to translate it into digital marketing that works. We start with the strategy question before we ever talk tactics, and we scale from a one time diagnostic to full execution depending on what you actually need.

If you're not sure whether your problem is strategy or execution, that's a good place to start the conversation.

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Yes, some of this was written with the help of AI, but our content starts and ends with humans. Please visit our AI policy.