Straight answers

Should I hire an agency or do it myself?

The case for doing it yourself

Claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile is free and entirely doable in an afternoon of careful work. Asking every customer for a review costs nothing. Writing honest answers to common questions requires no tools. These are the highest-return activities in local marketing and none of them need an agency.

If money is tight, do these first. An agency that takes your money before you have claimed your own Google profile is not helping you.

Where it usually breaks down

• Time. Not the learning — the maintenance. Campaigns need attention weekly, forever, and it is the first thing to slide in a busy month.
• The dip. Your first campaigns will be bad. Professionals absorb that on somebody else's budget; you absorb it on yours.
• The unglamorous parts. Tracking setup, CRM configuration, automation plumbing. Nobody enjoys these and they are where results actually come from.
• Consistency. Marketing done in bursts when work goes quiet produces exactly the feast-and-famine cycle you were trying to escape.

An honest way to decide

Work out what an hour of your time is worth on the tools. If marketing takes eight hours a month and an agency costs less than eight of your hours, the arithmetic favors hiring — assuming they actually produce. If they do not produce, no fee is low enough.

That is the reasoning behind running your first campaign as a performance trial: you should not have to take that bet on faith, and we would rather demonstrate than promise.

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