Hiring an in-house marketing team vs hiring an agency: pros and cons to consider

To attract more customers, boost revenues, and develop a strong brand, your company must handle a marketing strategy correctly. Some truly believe that having an in-house marketing team is a winning ticket to success while other businesses consider using digital agency services more convenient. 

Is your brand at the stage when you need to decide whether to hire an in-house marketing team or to collaborate with a full-service digital marketing agency? Any decision you make will significantly impact your business development, so make sure you study the two possible scenarios well enough to understand which one suits you best. 

In the following article, we will overview these pivotal points:

• Pros & cons of hiring an in-house marketing team and approximate costs
• Pros & cons of hiring an agency and approximate costs
• What to do if your in-house marketing department performs poorly/lacks expertise

Let’s dive into the comparison right now!

Pros & cons of hiring an in-house marketing team and approximate costs

According to analytics from Meaningful Brands, 84% of consumers expect to see content from brands that offer either entertainment or real solutions. No matter what the niche of your business is, a large part of your success depends on how you use the content to your advantage and how you work with content marketing in general. 

There are many marketing tools that can help you raise your sales, but the presence of a marketing team or agency is as important.

Depending on the needs of your business, it might seem more logical to hire a dedicated marketing team (or a few specialists) within the company. And here’s why. 

Pros

Deep understanding

If you find a knowledgeable, experienced team, they can handle everything you need to grow lead generation and acquire new customers at a slower pace.The person who works in your business has a much better understanding of the needs of your business and more knowledge of your company’s products. 

Your full-time employees probably gain more experience with your company. And because they spend more time with you, they are probably more familiar with your products and services, which consequently leads to deeper relationships. If you are a B2B company, this factor may be more important as you have a specialized market in which a third-party agency may not have the right experience you need.  

Collaborative content production

When a person does your marketing, they can draw on the knowledge and insights from your entire team. It’s incredible how much industry knowledge may be stored in the heads of your team members. Your team can be a great source of content ideas and maybe even new marketing initiatives worth trying out. Plus, you will always have full control over your content production.

Total focus on your brand

Digital marketing agency or in house? It’s apparent that, unlike an agency that works with multiple companies, your in-house marketer focuses only on you. Your team will tailor any marketing event to your needs and will listen to everything you have to say. A dedicated marketing department spends all of its time figuring out what works for you and making adjustments to your marketing goals and marketing process. 

Cons

Lack of consistency

One of the problems with in-house marketing is that they often work part-time. Perhaps they already have another job. When this happens, the consistency changes very quickly. It’s easy to miss weeks of posting new content and not checking your ad campaign statistics. Without a dedicated team, the marketing campaign in most companies often becomes inconsistent.

Irregular training

Most marketing agencies often take the time to update their knowledge and skills. This training can include attending marketing conferences, sharing new articles and resources online, and brainstorming across departments. When working internally, a marketer usually has less time to focus on improving his knowledge and skills. They also don’t have the opportunity to learn from different marketing departments.

Recruitment efforts

It takes time to set up an internal marketing department, whether you hire one or three employees. Almost 50 days – over two months – is the average time it takes to build a team. You risk wasting a lot of energy and time. For example, it is necessary that your human resources department establish and describe the list and concentrate on attracting applications. Additionally, interviews must be scheduled and your opinion will probably be required before you select a new worker. It’s a huge commitment for your company to establish and retain an internal marketing staff.

Lack of new ideas

When an in-house marketer works alone to manage all of the marketing efforts, it can lead to stagnation. It’s hard to keep coming up with new and innovative ways to promote products and share content when you don’t have anyone to brainstorm with. Even though the rest of the company can help, the in-house marketer will have fewer new ideas than the creative marketing team at the agency.

Large investments

While it may seem like you are doing a better deal with hiring people in the short term, it can get more costly in the long term. 

Now here comes the obvious question:  How much does it cost to hire a marketing team?

In the beginning, you pay the marketing company more money to set it up, but over time this will decrease to a maintenance cost. With your own marketing team, you continue to pay them an annual salary as well as benefits. And over time, this amount will only increase.

Here is the average salary for key marketing roles:

• Marketing Manager – $107,697 per year
• Social Media Manager (SMM) – $105,102 per year
• SEO Manager – $82,475 per year

Thus, you will spend nearly $295,000, or maybe even more, a year on providing a salary for your workers alone if you decide to hire a marketing team long-term. But these are not all of the costs. In addition to these, you also need to consider taxes and social benefits, vacation pay, bonuses, health insurance costs, as well as the cost of renting (buying) premises, equipment, and software.

Pros & cons for hiring an agency and approximate costs

Agency marketing offers your business an external marketing team that employs several internet marketing methods to build your business. The concern, however, is if you have the best choice for an Internet marketing firm.

Scroll down to study the reasons to hire a digital marketing agency and the possible disadvantages that you might face on the way too.

Pros

Proven expertise 

A great aspect of hiring an outer marketing company is the ability to avoid diving into the intricacies of digital marketing. Agency employees live and breathe their craft. They have spent years mastering their professions and discovering tools and strategies, and at the same time continue to study specialized blogs, research, and news for several hours a day in order to keep their skills and knowledge refreshed. 

Concentration on business

If you hire a marketing agency to promote your company on the Internet, you can concentrate on business processes without any stress. You are already doing a lot of work: Internet communications, transport services, repair of equipment and vehicles. For the most part, you outsource the maintenance of all this to third-party companies. So why should it be any different with digital marketing?

Again, with this approach, there is no need for management, adaptation, and training of the internal team, since all elements of online marketing are handled by the team on the side.

Access to cutting-edge technology and tools

Perhaps you already work with some kind of email automation tool (Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, Customer.io, or maybe even Pardot), but do you have applications for monitoring the ranking of your web resources in search engines for key queries? Are you using specialized tools to create and promote your landing pages? Have you budgeted for licenses for photo and video editing applications like Adobe? Can you calculate the ROI of your advertising campaigns and do a bunch of other things?

Digital marketing agencies use all of these tools and more because, without them, you can’t create a competitive product. Moreover, they don’t just use them, they master these tools at a professional level, which can be achieved only after several years of experience using them.

A clear marketing strategy

The agencies understand the importance of your business, and they also understand that you can terminate the contract at any time if you feel like you aren’t achieving the expected results. 

Remember: marketing management is their niche. Most marketing agencies have someone on the team who is fully committed to the strategy. This strategy manager is the person in charge of managing your marketing. Agencies are much more advanced when it comes to your marketing management because they have a specialist for every marketing strategy, and their team consists of multiple specialists. 

Cost-effectiveness

You may be surprised, but working with a digital marketing agency is frequently significantly cheaper than hiring in-house marketing. You pay a retainer to a marketing agency for the marketing services you receive. These are usually permanent retainers, but you can adjust them to meet the demands of your company. For instance, if you had some spare cash in the budget for one month, you could use it to invest in a new marketing campaign.

Collaboration costs with marketing agencies can vary from $20,000 to $200,000 per year.

For example, your company can engage in SEO services with a digital marketing agency that costs between $750 and $2,000 per month, or between $9,000 and $24,000 per year. This is far lower than what an SEO specialist would ask for with the average salary of $50,000 – $90,000.

Cons

Despite all the benefits, working with a digital marketing agency has some drawbacks, too.

Location & culture difference

You may locate agencies worldwide that are disadvantageous to companies who wish to engage with a local commercial enterprise. This might be a challenge if you want to set schedules. 

Therefore you may work with one who is experienced with these types of customer connections if you choose to collaborate with an agency in a different time zone. There are some systems that can make it seamless to work with you. Cultural differences are also a thing, so keep this in mind to avoid misunderstandings.

You are not the only employer

You need to understand that you are not the only business the marketing agency will collaborate with. However, anyone you hire will commit their entire working day to your company. Clients at an agency require equal attention. A full-time employee is also more accessible because they are based in your building! If this is a big deciding factor for a business, hiring an employee is the best option.

Inconsistent control

You as a business would feel the need to control each and every detail, but that’s not how it always works with the agency. You will need to trust them and loosen up control once you decide to choose this path. The detachment from the personal connection is the first consequence of outsourcing digital marketing. What occurs is that agencies sometimes do everything their way and do not allow business owners to execute their work. As a result, you may feel as if you are losing control of your company.

Therefore, choosing an agency with a sustainable reporting process will be the best solution for your business. Typically, a digital marketing agency reports to the clients at least once a month. Marketing reporting will enable you to track the work progress and optimize a strategy. 

Safety concern

Management of sensitive corporate data might be a problem. To decrease the chance of your marketing data being mistreated, choose an agency that you can trust.

One of the most valid ways to protect your business security when working with a marketing agency is to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). It’s a legally binding agreement that specifies how you will use confidential information and deliverables during the cooperation. Protecting your ideas, patents, non-public accounting statistics, and customer lists is critical to preventing product ownership and intellectual property issues.

What to do if your in-house marketing department performs poorly / lacks expertise

The transition to in-house provides some challenges. The increased strain of recruiting and sustaining an efficient in-house marketing staff comes with a new method of working. In fact, according to the most recent Bannerflow survey, the largest impediments to efficient in-house marketing are a lack of expertise about programmatic buying and a lack of resources to establish a professional in-house team. 

Some firms may recruit the best marketing staff in the world, yet they will still fall short of the results we have consistently delivered for our previous clients. The reason for this is that they don’t have the necessary training. If you believe that your in-house team performs poorly, you should start thinking about how to hire a digital marketing agency so you can try this method of handling the marketing needs for your business. 

Summary & Conclusion

When comparing digital agency vs in-house, you need to understand that by choosing the second path, you will have to take full responsibility for the team you create as well as invest a lot of time and money in the team creation itself.  If you can afford to hire a digital marketing employee or team and you are sure you can handle the whole team by yourself, great! But if you can’t, using an agency is a better option.  

Outsourcing your marketing to an agency can bring you a lot of advantages and peace as you will know someone is taking care of your marketing process. Most importantly, marketing agencies have a ton of industry knowledge to create the most innovative and profitable plan for you and your brand, providing your business with better marketing management.

Are you inclined to work with a marketing agency? Rampiq is a perfect fit for you if you’re looking for the top-notch experts who know how to implement the most sophisticated marketing plans. We design our project teams individually, blending expertise with personality fit, and allocating top resources whenever you need them, anytime. 

Moreover, Rampiq has a big experience working with in-house marketing teams, complementing their efforts, and creating a synergetic relationship. Read more about the benefits of hiring Rampiq to work with your in-house marketing team here.

Rampiq digital marketing agency will be glad to hear about the marketing challenges your business faces and would be happy to implement a powerful strategy designed to boost your sales!