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 in 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 of your business.
The increasing need to outsource marketing teams
More and more organizations are outsourcing their marketing teams and for good reasons, too. One is that it is almost always more cost-effective to outsource marketing tasks than to hire and maintain an in-house marketing team. This is you only pay for only the required tasks when you outsource, rather than having to pay for the salaries and benefits of full-time employees.
Another reason is that marketing process outsourcing can give you access to any specialized expertise and knowledge that your in-house team may not have. Marketing is a complex field, with many different sub-disciplines and specialties. With outsourcing, companies can tap into the expertise of professionals who have experience working with SaaS products and understand the unique challenges and opportunities involved in marketing them. We will discuss more on this later in this article.
Further, by choosing an outside marketing team, businesses are more agile and responsive to ever-changing market conditions. This means that you can quickly and easily adjust its marketing strategy and tactics as needed, without having to go through the time-consuming process of hiring and training new employees. This keeps your company competitive in the fast-changing SaaS market.
In-house vs outsourcing marketing: Should you outsource your marketing?
Whether or not to outsource your marketing team is a decision that ultimately depends on your specific business needs and circumstances. There are pros and cons to outsourcing, and the right choice for your company will depend on a variety of factors.
As mentioned earlier, marketing process outsourcing is a way to save costs while also accessing specialized expertise. However, there are also potential downsides to outsourcing. For example, you may have less control over the direction and execution of your marketing efforts when they are being handled by an outside firm. Additionally, outsourcing can sometimes result in a lack of consistency and coordination between your marketing and other departments within your company.
Ultimately, the decision to outsource your marketing team should be based on careful consideration of your business goals, resources, and market conditions. Later on in this article, we will look at the pros and cons of your various outsourcing options – agency vs freelancer vs consultant.
First, let’s discuss the benefits and factors to consider when outsourcing SaaS marketing, so you can determine the best course of action for your company.
Factors to consider when outsourcing SaaS marketing
To grow your SaaS business, you must consider all the necessary marketing tasks that need to be done to make your product successful. Although you can perform some of these tasks yourself, there are many advantages to outsourcing other parts of the marketing process.
By doing so, you can focus on what you do best and leave the rest to the experts. However, it’s important to carefully select an agency that can meet your specific needs. Here are the most important factors you should consider when outsourcing your SaaS marketing.
SaaS marketing experience
When outsourcing your marketing team, it’s important to consider their SaaS marketing experience. SaaS products have their own unique challenges and opportunities, so they require a specialized approach to marketing.
An agency with SaaS marketing experience will have a deep understanding of the SaaS market and the specific issues and opportunities involved in promoting and selling SaaS products. This includes understanding the buying process and decision-making criteria of SaaS customers, as well as the most effective ways to market and sell SaaS products.
Without this experience, the agency may not have the same level of expertise and understanding, which could lead to less effective marketing and a lower return on investment.
By choosing an agency with SaaS marketing experience, you’ll benefit from their knowledge and expertise and can trust that your marketing efforts are being handled by professionals who understand the SaaS market and know how to succeed in it.
Their technologies and tools
Working with an agency that has the right tools and resources can greatly improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Plus, you won’t have to invest in the same technology and tools on your own. This is especially helpful for companies that don’t have the resources or expertise to build and maintain their own toolkit.
Even without access to the tools themselves, you can trust that the agency’s strategies are well-planned thanks to their use of professional tools. By partnering with an agency that has a strong technology and tools offering, your SaaS company can benefit from their investment and be confident in the support of the latest technology and data for your marketing efforts.
Pricing
As a savvy SaaS business owner, you know that choosing the right marketing agency is key to maximizing your budget and achieving your desired results. That’s why it’s crucial to select an agency that offers competitive pricing without sacrificing quality or performance.
When evaluating the pricing of a marketing agency, consider not only the initial cost but also the potential long-term value of the agency’s services. This can include factors like the expected return on investment, the potential for cost savings through the use of professional tools and resources, and the potential for improved marketing effectiveness and performance.
It’s also essential to scrutinize the pricing structure and terms of the agency’s contract to ensure that you understand exactly what is included in the price and what is not. This can help you avoid unexpected costs and ensure that your marketing efforts are supported by a high-quality agency at a competitive price.
By carefully considering the pricing of a marketing agency, you can make an informed decision that balances cost and value, ensuring that your marketing efforts are supported by a top-notch agency at a price that fits your budget.
Similar case studies
Most agencies show off their case studies on their websites. These case studies tell you the types of challenges the agency has faced, the projects they’ve worked on, and how they’ve used various strategies and tactics to achieve success for their clients. This can help you evaluate the agency’s approach and see if it aligns with your own goals and needs.
Further, case studies can provide valuable information about the results and outcomes the agency has achieved for other clients whose companies were in a similar situation to yours. These can include increased website traffic, improved lead generation, and higher conversion rates, among others. This is valuable information to help evaluate the potential value of the agency’s services for your company.
References and client feedback
References and feedback from the agency’s clients can provide valuable insights into the agency’s performance, capabilities, and results. Reading the agency’s clients’ feedback can provide you with valuable insights into the agency’s performance and results. It also gives you a sense of the experiences and opinions of other companies that have worked with the agency. You can use this information to help evaluate the agency’s capabilities and potential value for your company.
Note that many agencies post fake reviews on their websites. So, not only should you review the feedback on their website, but also check for reviews on standard platforms, such as Clutch.co., and if possible, contact a few of the agency’s references to learn about the experiences of other companies that have worked with the agency, as well as the agency’s strengths and weaknesses. This can include things like the level of support and communication the agency provided, the quality of the agency’s work, and the results and outcomes the agency achieved for the client.
With these, you will gain valuable insights that you can use to make an informed decision about whether to work with the agency.
Delivery times
The speed at which the agency is able to deliver its services can impact the effectiveness and success of your marketing efforts.
If the agency has a track record of delivering its services quickly and efficiently, this can be beneficial for your company, as it can help to ensure that your marketing efforts are able to keep pace with the fast-changing SaaS market. This can be particularly important for companies that need to be agile and responsive to changing market conditions.
For example, if the agency is slow to deliver content or marketing materials, this could delay the launch of your marketing campaigns, which could reduce their effectiveness and impact.
By carefully considering the agency’s delivery times, a SaaS company can ensure that it is working with an agency that is able to deliver its services quickly and efficiently and can help to support the success of your overall marketing efforts.
Communication
Effective communication is essential for the success of any marketing partnership and can impact the quality, timeliness, and effectiveness of the agency’s services.
Good communication can also help to prevent misunderstandings and misalignments and can support the smooth and efficient execution of your marketing campaigns.
Poor communication could result in delays, misunderstandings, and misaligned efforts, which could impact the success of your marketing campaigns. For example, if the agency is unable to effectively communicate your business goals and objectives, this could result in marketing efforts that are not aligned with your overall strategy, which could reduce their effectiveness and impact.
By carefully considering the agency’s communication, a SaaS company can ensure that it is working with an agency that is able to effectively communicate and collaborate, and can support the success of the company’s marketing efforts.
Deciding what digital marketing tasks to outsource
As a SaaS decision-maker, it’s important to carefully consider which marketing tasks to outsource and which to handle in-house. First, start by identifying your organization’s strengths and weaknesses. For instance, if your in-house team has a wealth of content marketing experience, you may want to keep that work in-house, but consider outsourcing tasks such as SEO, PPC, or social media marketing.
Next, think about your business goals and objectives and prioritize the tasks that are most critical to achieving those goals. Ex., if your primary focus is on increasing website traffic and lead generation, you may want to put a lot of effort into tasks like SEO and pay-per-click advertising, and outsource those tasks to an experienced agency.
Finally, make sure to take into account your marketing budget and resources, including time and personnel. This will help you determine which tasks your company has the capacity to handle internally, and which tasks may be better suited to marketing process outsourcing.
By considering these factors, you can develop a marketing strategy that is aligned with your business goals and resources, and make the most effective use of your outsourced marketing efforts.
FULL GUIDE: What Tasks/Areas Can Be Outsourced in a SaaS Business Marketing?
Benefits of hiring an in-house marketing team
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.
Deep understanding of your business
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.
Full control over marketing efforts
You have greater control over your marketing efforts if you hire an in-house marketing team, compared to when you outsource marketing. This allows you to closely align your marketing strategies with your overall business goals.
However, while this is a huge positive for in-house teams, if you outsource to an experienced marketing agency or consultant, they will bring a unique perspective to your process. Therefore, you’re better off with an in-house team if you have a working process and wish to maintain it in the best way possible. But if you need new strategies and insights into the strategies used by the biggest players in your industry, then the agencies’ experience would be invaluable to your business.
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
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 of hiring an in-house marketing team
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. 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:
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.
Benefits of hiring an outsourced marketing team or outsourcing
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.
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.
An experienced agency will have a track record of successfully marketing SaaS products, and will have a deep understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities involved in promoting and selling these types of products.
In contrast, an in-house team may not have the same level of experience and specialized knowledge, which could result in less effective marketing efforts and a lower return on investment. By outsourcing to an experienced agency, a SaaS company can benefit from the agency’s expertise and track record and can be confident that its marketing efforts are being handled by professionals who understand the SaaS market and know how to succeed in it.
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, and 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. This can include things like marketing automation software, analytics platforms, and research tools, among others.
Having access to these tools can be particularly useful if you do not have the resources or expertise to build and maintain your own toolkit. By outsourcing to an agency, a company can benefit from the agency’s investment in professional tools and resources and can take advantage of its capabilities without having to make the same investment itself.
An in-house marketing team may not have access to the same range of professional tools and resources. This can limit the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and make it more difficult for the team to gather and analyze data, track results, and identify opportunities for improvement. By outsourcing to an agency, a SaaS company can gain access to a wider range of professional tools and resources and can be confident that its marketing efforts are being supported by the latest technology and data.
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 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 an average salary of $50,000 – $90,000.
READ ALSO: Key Benefits of Outsourcing Digital Marketing for a SaaS CEO
Cons of hiring an outside marketing team
Despite all the benefits, working with a digital marketing agency has some drawbacks, too.
Location & cultural differences
You may locate agencies worldwide that are disadvantageous to companies that 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.
However, this can also be a good thing, because since the agency works with several companies, they have a wealth of valuable experience that they can implement for your business.
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 a 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 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.
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 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.
Our core verticals include:
Moreover, Rampiq has solid 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!
