Hiring a Marketing Agency vs. In-House Marketing Team: Pros, Cons, & Pro Tips
As your business grows and you start building a budget exclusively for marketing efforts, deciding between hiring a marketing agency or building an in-house team becomes a challenge in and of itself. To help you make your decision, I collected a list of pros, cons, and pro tips from conversations and experiences that I've had in the past. So, here are some thoughts to consider when deciding between hiring a marketing agency and an in-house marketing team:
Marketing Agency
Pros
The Marketing Mindset. Since agencies are focused solely on marketing, they can quickly develop marketing strategies for your business that match your business goals.
Capacity for Being Creative. Creativity is one of the primary value-adds for marketing agencies. Aside from bringing a new perspective, agencies have plenty of resources to create from designers to software, and tools needed to create beautiful creative assets.
Immediate Access to Experts with Years of Experience. If you want a team of experts that have been through similar processes with other clients and understands patterns and trends, an agency may be the better move. They can help you quickly find the best ways to communicate with your audience.
A Fresh, New Perspective. Similarly to creativity, a marketing agency unfamiliar with your business can more easily look at problems in a new light and find solutions that you may not have considered.
Increased Efficiency for Your Business. Marketing agencies already have established processes that make implementing your marketing strategy much more efficient in terms of finances and time.
Quality Work for Less Money. For the cost of one or two full-time employees, you can get an entire agency of marketing experts working on your project capable of producing valuable assets for your business.
Access to Powerful Marketing Tools. Marketing agencies have developed (or purchased) marketing tools that are not commonly available to small businesses. With agencies, you get access to teams that know the ins and outs of how these powerful tools work.
Cons
Increased Risk. Hiring your first marketing agency, or a new marketing agency comes with risk. While initially a cost-effective option in the short term, any major pivoting in your strategy or repeated mistakes can quickly lead to a net-zero or negative ROI.
Lack of Industry Experience. To be frank, marketing agencies work with a lot of different businesses. It can take time to become familiar with your business, customers, or industry.
Agencies Serve Clients Other Than You. A marketing agency can only make its service as cheap as it does when working with other clients. Because agencies have a tendency to be getting pulled in a lot of different directions, their clients need to be able to recognize that they aren’t the marketing agency’s only client.
Increased Time Investment. Similarly to the point about agencies having a lack of industry experience, this often leads to them requesting meeting time with you and your team and asking a lot of questions to learn as much about your business or industry as they can. This requires an additional investment of time by you or your team.
Less Control Over Content. Marketing agencies will take your marketing strategy and implement it how they see fit. While they are experts, miscommunication does happen and you could run into challenges around deliverables.
Longer Turn-Around For Revisions. Since your business is not developing the creative assets internally, revisions will require back and forth and can slow the process of implementation.
Decisions are Less Data-Driven. Depending on how much data you have collected for your business or are willing to share with your marketing agency can drastically affect the results of their efforts.
Pro Tips
Come Prepared. Know ahead of time what you are looking for when hiring a marketing agency. Do you know what would make hiring the marketing agency successful? Do you know what you are hoping to accomplish in terms of revenue and non-revenue goals (i.e. increased brand awareness)?
Look At Their Values. Like people, businesses can have different long-term goals and values. Talk to the agency. Do they value the same things that you and your business does?
Make Sure You Have Matching Communication Preferences. Some agencies prefer to meet in person every week while others are comfortable with just the occasional email communication. Figure out what works for you and find an agency that values the same.
Be Open-Minded and Flexible. Agencies are very creative and want to help your business succeed. When they brainstorm, be sure to listen to new ideas and consider their recommendations as experts.
Three Situations Where Agencies Are Perfect. You have a Small budget (between $70-150K/yr). You need to get it right the first time. You lack an effective marketing strategy.
In-House Marketing Team
Pros
Experts on Your Business. An in-house team are pros when it comes to your business. They understand your company values, and customers, and can produce consistent messaging and branding because they live and breathe your business with you.
Greater Control Over Your Marketing Efforts. Since they are a part of your business, it is easier to develop and implement your own strategy. And, if things suddenly change, you can quickly pivot to whatever you need.
Transparency & Access to Data. With your own in-house team, you don’t have to worry as much about sharing sensitive business data or write Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA’s) since you own your business’s data.
A Dedicated Team. When your business is the only entity that your in-house marketing team is working for, you can trust them to devote their full attention to your business.
Being Agile and Efficient. With your business being the center of your in-house marketing team’s efforts, you don’t run into additional fees like you would with a marketing agency. Last minute additions to a campaign can quickly be assembled by your internal team without any added barriers.
Lower Level of Risk. Since you have trained your own internal marketing team, if the project doesn't work out well, you can pivot without having to go through the effort of finding another marketing agency.
Better Data-Driven Decisions. Access to more and better data means that your in-house marketing team can make much more accurate decisions for your business to really move the needle.
Custom In-House Technology. With your own in-house team, they can develop a custom marketing tech stack that meets your business's needs exactly.
Cons
Higher Minimum Cost. The initial cost of finding, hiring, and training the first few members of your marketing team is substantial. For a small, four-person SEO team their total salaries would sit around $261,500 per year without any additional benefits.
Limited Skill Sets, Creativity, and Perspective. When you hire your marketing team, especially at the beginning, your staff will have limited ability and could run into creative blocks when they only work with your business. Additionally, falling into routine can cause the team to lose the initial energy and drive toward goals they may have had early on.
More Work For HR. Since you are adding a whole new department to your business, the talent recruitment, training, conflict, and employee turnover are going to require a lot of work for your HR team.
Costly in Slow or Off-Season Periods. During slow seasons, especially for seasonal businesses, maintaining a full marketing team can be very costly.
Software Expenses. Your new marketing team will need software to collect data, produce creative assets, and analyze marketing efforts. All of which cost money that a marketing agency might already be paying for.
Hardware Expenses. Often forgotten, the hardware costs that come with hiring an internal marketing team can be substantial. Especially for a content development team, the cameras, lights, microphones, computers, and editing software can require a huge investment that a marketing agency has built up over years and years of work.
Pro Tips
Consider Workload. You may have high aspirations for your marketing team and want them to do everything that your marketing agency is doing. Be mindful that an agency has a big network of employees that can distribute the workload. Your first five hires won't be able to match the output of an agency for a while.
Hire The Right People. Find people that share the same values as your business and are willing to find things to do and get them done. This will be crucial, especially in the first five to ten hires of your team.
Ensure You Have Training Time. Putting together your own internal team requires a lot of run-up time to find, hire, and train everyone. Give yourself six to twelve months of run-up time to get everything planned and ready for the launch of your first internal campaign.
Create Small Specialized Groups. Don't try and exclusively hire jack-of-all-trades of marketing, they won't be as efficient in every role. Figure out which service you find that you constantly need from marketing agencies and start building a specialized team around that service, like SEO, social media, or paid advertising.
Three Situations Where In-House Teams Are Perfect. You have the ability to start investing time and money into building a powerful team. You want to hire a team of experts within your company. You don't want to spend time coordinating with a network of marketing agencies.
While some companies find hiring a marketing agency is the best decision for their business, others benefit from developing an in-house marketing team. By weighing the pros and cons, you will find which decision makes the most sense for your business. And remember, a combination of both could be an answer as well. Keep up the great work, and we hope to hear from you soon!
