In-House Marketing vs. Hiring a Marketing Agency – What’s the best option?
Digital Marketing has the potential to keep your business running. Therefore, you need to make sure that you are investing your money wisely on marketing. This is where you will come across the need to have a dedicated Internet marketing team, which will keep your business moving forward. Whether you are interested in Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing or Pay-per-click advertising, Online Marketing can help in growing your business.
When you come across the need to get an internet marketing team, you will notice that two prominent options are available for you to consider. Here, you can either go for an In-house Marketing team or you can simply recruit a Digital Marketing Agency to get the job done. We often see how most of the business owners get lost while trying to make a decision out of these two. That’s why we thought of comparing these two options, so that you can pick the right option and move forward.
Quick table Summary of Having an in-house marketing team In-house marketing vs. hiring a marketing agency
Inhouse vs. Agency | Pros | Cons |
---|---|---|
In-House marketing Team |
|
|
Digital Marketing Agency |
|
|
The in-house marketing team will be made out of salaried employees of your company. They will create the marketing campaigns, and execute them. In addition to that, they will also be able to manage the long term marketing campaigns as well.
Here are the benefits that you can experience from the in-house marketing team
Familiarity with your branding
The in-house marketing team has a clear understanding about your brand and the values associated with it. Hence, you don’t have to provide any special training to them on branding. On the other hand, you don’t have to correct the mistakes that they make when using your brand in the marketing campaigns. Due to brand familiarity, you can expect them to use your brand in the best possible manner to deliver positive results on your way.
Accessibility
Whenever you come across the need to access your in-house marketing team, you are provided with the chance to do it. They are working with you in the same office. Therefore, you will find it as an easy task to have face to face meetings with them. You will also be able to receive the benefits that come along with improved responsiveness of them. If you are hiring an external Marketing agency you would be communicating with them through phone, mail or chat, therefore it becomes important to hire an Agency that can communicate better and timely.
Ability to focus
The in-house marketing team will be able to focus entirely on your business and provide you with the chance to design and launch the marketing campaigns. You can make sure that no person in your in-house marketing team is working on two different marketing campaigns for different brands. You can ask them to focus only on your brand and provide you with the most powerful marketing campaigns at the end of the day. While Agencies dedicate the different parts of their time to different marketing campaigns.
Control
You are having an extremely high level of control in the in-house marketing team. Since they are working for your company, you will be able to experience the benefits that come along with shared responsibility as well. You will fall in love with the benefits that you can receive out of the high level of control that you have over the marketing team. If you don’t like sharing control over your marketing campaigns then in-house marketing might be a right choice for you.
There are some drawbacks associated with managing an in-house marketing team as well. Here are the most prominent drawbacks out of them.
You have to recruit the talent
It is up to your HR team and management to recruit the right individuals into the in-house Internet Marketing team. In general, it will take around 50 days for you to recruit the right candidate and welcome him to the Digital Marketing position of the company. You will have to spend lots of resources and efforts to schedule the interviews, prepare documents and hire the candidate. These are unwanted expenses, which most of the companies don’t prefer to bear.
Employee expenses
Some of the people assume that having an in-house marketing team is cheaper when compared to managing an external marketing team. This fact is not true at all. If you can do a bit of a research about the industry average salary scale, you can get a better understanding about it. In addition to the salary, you will have to bear the cost of providing facilities to the in-house marketing team, bear their insurance and even focus on their retirement plans. This will make you spend a considerable amount of money from your business as well.
Tools Expense
Besides the cost of recruiting and maintaining an In-house Internet Marketing Team, you will also have to spend your money on buying expensive SEO and Graphic Design tools.
Although hiring an external Marketing Agency has its own expenses but eventually it is more affordable compared to in-house marketing. But when you hire a professional Digital Marketing Agency they would already have their tools and designers ready to create the best solution for you.
Team Ability
The abilities of your in-house marketing team might get limited due to lack of team members, or tight budget. Also if you want to recruit only the local candidates then the recruitment process might take long. While an Online Marketing Agency can provide you with a capable team and tools to help your business
Scaling Marketing Efforts
Scaling and increasing your marketing efforts can be a very good decision for your business. But this becomes difficult in the In-House Marketing team because of limited team members and resources. While, when working with an Agency you just have to inform them about your decisions and their team will take care of everything.
Employee Revenue
Employee Revenue exists when you have an in-house team. And it might night be very pleasing to your company budget. Because of a small team and extra pressure, maybe the marketing efforts for your business get compromised. But, while working with a Digital Marketing Agency You don’t have to worry about the strategy of the Marketing campaigns. If the pressure is more they will partner with other members of the team to keep the process smooth.
Now you know how it is to have an in-house marketing team for the business. Along with that, you must also take a look at the situation on how it is to handover all the marketing related needs that you have to a dedicated marketing agency.
Now you know how it is to have an in-house marketing team for the business. Along with that, you must also take a look at the situation on how it is to handover all the marketing related needs that you have to a dedicated Digital Marketing Agency. After reading this you might come up with a decision.
Hiring an Internet Marketing Agency vs. in-house marketing team will have the following benefits.
You can get the help of expert marketers
The Digital Marketing Agency you hire will be made out of expert marketers. Once you handover the task, you can make sure that you are getting the support of those expert marketers at all times. These marketers have plenty of experience in the industry. On the other hand, they come from a strong Digital Marketing background as well.
You will be able to get that background to deliver a variety of benefits to you. Due to the same reason, it can make sure that you are generating the highest return out of your investment at all times.
They are aware about the right strategies and tactics
There are numerous Online marketing strategies and tactics available to follow. Once you handover the marketing needs of your business to the marketing agency, you can expect the workers to focus on the latest marketing strategies and tactics.
They will not just blindly select the strategies and tactics. Instead, they will do a comprehensive analysis of your business and pick the most effective tactics. Then you will be provided with the opportunity to experience all the benefits that come along with them.
They have access to right tools and software
A variety of marketing tools and software applications are available. If you try to purchase these tools and software applications, you will have to spend a considerable amount of money on the subscription expenses.
You can make sure that you aren’t spending such a lot of money on the subscriptions by making the decision to hire a marketing agency. They will use their subscriptions to the right tools and software applications to deliver amazing results to your Digital marketing campaigns.
They have diverse specialties
People who are working for the marketing agency will have many different specialties as well. This can also deliver a bunch of outstanding benefits to you. For example, you can expect to find experts in copywriting, web design, SEO, conversion rate optimization, paid advertising, email marketing and social media marketing.
Based on your requirement, the mix of right resources will be allocated to the task, so that you are provided with positive returns. You cannot expect to recruit such a lot of people who come from many different specialties to your company if you are on a tight budget.
You can scale the marketing team
One of the most prominent benefits that you can get from a marketing agency is that you have the freedom to scale your marketing team as you grow your business. Assume that you come across the need to run a comprehensive marketing campaign. In such a situation, scalability would kick in and it can provide you with the freedom to get more people to work on the project.
Scalability is a big pro if you are interested in extremely flexible Marketing Campaigns.
Investment and Cost
As we have mentioned earlier that you might believe that in-house marketing team would be affordable compared to an Agency. But that is not the case when you compare the real time scenarios. Hiring an Agency will save your money and time on things like recruiting new staff, Subscribing to Marketing tools, and Employee revenue. Therefore, if we compare a Marketing Agency it can be a lot more affordable than an in-house marketing team.
Working with Digital Marketing Agency does has some drawbacks and they are,
Location
The marketing agency will be located in a different place from your office. Therefore, you will come across numerous coordination and communication issues. On the other hand, you will also come across lots of challenges when you are trying to align the schedules as well.
Hence, If you are going to hire an Agency make sure they have experience in handling clients of different time zones, different cities and different countries. Because an experienced company will make all the work seamless and easy.
Managing multiple clients
The marketing agency will manage multiple client projects at the same time. Therefore, a copywriter who works for you might also be working on another project, which belongs to a completely different industry. When the resource is not focusing fully on the project, you can expect to receive a reduction in the quality of work.
An Experienced and Quality Marketing Services will never make you and your work feel neglected. In case you feel neglected you don’t have to go for In-house Marketing but you just need to change your Marketing Agency.
Control
We know that some companies like to have full control over their Marketing campaigns. But the Marketing Agencies need some freedom to apply their strategies to create a successful marketing plan. There this might produce some friction if you don’t like sharing control of your marketing decisions. You just need to trust the Agency and it will provide you with the best plans and strategies.
After all the above information we think that you would be able to take a decision. And if you are still struggling whether to hire an Agency or an in-house marketing team, we know that it is difficult to decide. But we can only provide you with facts and information.
If you own a small business you can do the marketing on your own. However, if you are looking to scale up, Go for a professional Marketing Agency.
You can make the best decision for your business depending on its requirements and necessity.
If your business doesn’t have a good Digital Marketing Plan, your targeted customers will never be able to find you online.
In today’s Digital world, almost everyone searches online for the products and services they are interested in. In this case if you are not working on your Digital marketing campaign, you will be missing out on so many opportunities to increase online conversions, and website traffic through Digital Marketing .
Good digital Marketing Strategies can help in increasing the online visibility of business, this will make it easy for target customers to find your business online.
Digital Marketing includes many different kinds of strategies but SEO is the most important one. SEO will help your website to appear on the top of search results, which in turn will increase website traffic and customers. And a Strategy like PPC helps in advertising your website on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
You can use either one, or a combination of few strategies to get the best results.
An agency and an In-house marketing both can manage many different types of Internet Marketing strategies like SEO, Social Media Marketing, Pay-Per-Click Advertising, Website design, etc. But, A professional Marketing Agency might be better at handling these strategies.
More than 85% of consumers search online for the products they require before buying. This means your business needs to have a proper SEO campaign to reach a large audience.
In simple terms, SEO of any kind, Off-page SEO or On-page SEO helps in improving the rank of your website on search engine result pages(SERPs). And it is extremely important to rank high on search engine pages because 75% of searchers never go beyond the first search page result. This is why SEO is very important in the growth of your business.
SEO includes different strategies like keyword research, keyword marketing, meta description, content optimization and much more. All these strategies work together in increasing your website’s rank on the search results.
Hence it needs time, experience and expertise to create a successful SEO marketing campaign.
PPC is a great way to promote and advertise your products and services. You can decide your monthly budget accordingly and pay for the clicks on your targeted keywords ads. Because as the name suggests you only have to pay when someone clicks on the ad.
You have to bid for the keywords that you want to advertise through PPC ads. Your ad will appear above the organic search results. If a user clicks on the ad you have to pay some predetermined amount for every click
This Strategy works the best because it gives immediate results in a very cost effective way.
Content creation and marketing are also an important part of Online marketing Strategy as it would one of the reasons for a user to visit your website. For content marketing blogs are great options other than your usual website pages. You can use keywords throughout the content to rank high on search results.
But you need to make sure that your content is informative, engaging and has something that will interest your audience. If the audience likes your information there are great chances of them coming back to your website and sharing your website.
There are a number of ways to create content like writing content, creating infographics or making videos.
Approximately there are 3 billion active Social Media users. This makes Social media One of the best Online Marketing Platforms. Social Media Marketing can help your business reach a very large audience. It is also very cost effective. You can either use social media to increase your brand awareness or use it for driving website traffic and sales. Social media can also help you connect with users directly which is very good.
We know that not every business would have large marketing budgets to afford expensive marketing campaigns. If you are just starting or own a small business then social media marketing would be a perfect strategy for you. It will give you immense opportunities to grow your business by reaching a wide audience on a low budget.
Many of us think that Web Design is not a crucial part of Digital Marketing Campaigns. But, it is because user experience is the utmost important thing to increase your conversion rates. If your website is slow or your website is non responsive or difficult to use, all the traffic from Marketing Campaigns would be of no use.
So, making sure that your website provides the best user experience is also a strategy of good Digital Marketing Campaign. It is important for a website to look professional, clean and informative to create a good first impression.
If you are thinking of hiring a Digital Marketing Agency to handle the marketing campaign of your business, Akshar Softweb can be a good choice.
We provide all kinds of Digital and Online Marketing Services like on-page SEO, off-page SEO, PPC Management, Social Media Marketing, Website Design, Website development and more.
We also have experienced designers who can help in creating engaging content like infographics, Gifs, videos and more.
We have Digital Marketing and Web design solutions to fit every budget and requirement.
Contact us today for more information.