When cheaper is the right choice and when it is the expensive one

Cheaper is the right choice when the job is narrow, you can describe it, and someone on your side can check the result. It becomes the expensive choice when the job is wide, nobody owns it, and you cannot tell good work from busy work. Test any supplier on three things before you look at the quote. How much of the work is one skill? How much of your own time will it take? Can your records show if it worked?

Test one: is it one skill?

Write the job in one sentence. If it needs the word "and", it may be two jobs.

"Photograph forty products on a white background" is one skill. A freelancer does it well, and you can check the pictures yourself. "Get us more dealers across three states" is strategy, a page, ads, follow-up and records, all of which have to move together. A single freelancer can do the page or the ads, but nobody then owns the join.

Score it: 2 if it is one skill, 1 if it is two or three that a person can sequence, 0 if it spans channels.

Test two: what will it cost in your time?

A cheap supplier moves work onto you. A low fee often comes with copy, photographs, approvals and chasing all supplied from your side. If you give it four hours a week, those hours have a price: use what an hour of yours earns in sales, not your salary.

Do the sum before you compare fees: fee, plus your hours at that value, plus anything you must buy that the supplier does not provide. The cheapest fee often loses to the next one up. For a worked table of this sum, see the cost of a bad quote.

Score it: 2 if it asks for under two hours a week of you, 1 if two to five, 0 if more than five.

Test three: can you judge the work?

This is the test that weighs most. If you hold a record of enquiries by source, replies and quotes, you can tell a freelancer's work from noise within a few weeks. If you do not, a good supplier looks the same as a poor one and you will pay for months before a pattern shows.

When records are thin, buy the set-up of the records first, or pick a supplier who builds them, and keep the commitment short until the numbers exist. The register is described in why your marketing generates enquiries but few sales.

Score it: 2 if you have a working register, 1 if you keep a rough list, 0 if you have nothing.

Reading your score

This is a rule of thumb, not arithmetic. Use it to start the argument with yourself.

For example: a ceramic tableware maker in Khurja

This is an invented case. The owner sells to wholesalers in Delhi and Kolkata and wants more buyers from the Gulf. Three quotes come in and the owner takes the cheapest, a freelancer for a new catalogue site and social posts. The score would have been 1: the job spans several skills (0), it needs the owner's time for photographs and replies (1), and no enquiry book is kept (0).

The site arrives and looks good. Six months later there are no more overseas buyers than before. Nobody recorded where enquiries came from, and the freelancer's scope ended at the site. The mistake was giving a wide job to a supplier hired for a narrow one.

The owner moves to a junior agency whose scope includes an enquiry register, a short follow-up to every sample request and a list of target buyers. The fee is higher, the six months are gone, and the owner's own hours fall only some, since the agency drafts and the owner approves. The freelancer stays on for product photographs, a job that is one skill and easy to check.

When the cheaper option is simply right

Several jobs fit a freelancer well. A logo refresh does, and so do a brochure, a set of product photographs, a landing page built to a written brief and a Google Business Profile set up and checked. So does a short test of a channel before you commit. None needs a firm with account managers, and spending more would waste it.

When is a larger firm the cheaper choice?

When an in-house hire would sit idle. A business that needs strategy, content, ads and sales support, each for part of the week, would probably pay more for four hires than for a share of a team. This is the logic of an outsourced marketing department.

It does not fit if your volume is too small to keep a team busy, if you want one person to take your instructions, or if the work must be done in a local language by someone who lives in your town. Say so to any firm that quotes you, and weigh how it answers.

Score your own job first

Write your job in one sentence, price your hours and look at your records. Score the three tests, then decide which kind of supplier to ask. The pricing page says how we quote. If you want to talk it through, outsourced marketing department is the service nearest to the wider-job case, and you can tell us what you need.