Taking your marketing efforts in-house seems like a no-brainer. That’s the thing, you might just be taking the brains out of your whole marketing operation by doing just that.
While you may think we’re biased, and admittedly we may be, we also like to give our clients the best advice possible. If that means taking your efforts in-house, we’d be the first to help you with that transition. So let’s take a look at why that might not be the best idea for you.
We could insert any number of popular internet memes here to illustrate our point, but we’ll skip the pictures and get to the meat and potatoes of it all.
Outsourcing your marketing services offers you a multitude of advantages & benefits that are often not given enough weight.
Agencies offer pools of specialized functional expertise, which means they are uniquely positioned to:
Outsourcing lets businesses focus on what they do best. Usually, that isn’t marketing. Farming marketing strategy and execution to external experts creates the space companies need to concentrate resources on the R&D needed to have a competitive edge in increasingly saturated markets
Agencies work across verticals and market segments and bring that perspective and experience into every engagement. It may hurt to hear, but you’re not their only client. But that has its own advantages. That means you’ll get the benefit of a broader perspective. You get the return on all the content audits, keyword taxonomy analysis, site performance assessments, competitor analysis, and more that the agency is doing.
Time is money. Literally. Marketing plans require substantial time and effort. There are planning, strategy, creative development, deployment, and performance metrics, to say nothing of pivoting and iterating based on performance. Outsourcing these tasks saves you time - time that can be redeployed elsewhere to focus on core business operations and critical decision-making.
Agencies invest in, and have access to, the latest tools, technologies, and platforms. Outsourcing means you benefit from these resources without incurring the cost of purchasing and maintaining them in-house.
Market fluctuations are a fact of life, and your business may be affected by them. Outsourcing lets you scale up or down quickly based on fluctuating needs. Whether it's a short-term project or a long-term strategic engagement, outsourcing gives you the flexibility to adjust resources and adapt to changing market conditions
Something else no one talks about are the personnel costs. Sure, you need to hire more people, but that also means incremental HR expenses, new employee onboarding, sick leave to cover, payroll expenses, 401k contributions, training, and more. The simple solution to all those added expenses is an agency.
Turnover impacts internal team dynamics. Institutional knowledge is lost, putting tons of pressure on the remaining team. Maybe there is a skill gap that happens as a result, maybe someone has to learn on the fly. With an agency, you don’t have to worry about your strategy getting paused. They’ll partner you with another team member and keep your campaign moving forward. For your business, that means you can continue getting value from digital marketing. The right agency can be a key element of strategic continuity.
We’ve taken a birds-eye-view of the issues, but now let's dive in and look at specific areas where having an in-house agency can lead to challenges you won’t face with an external agency partner.
Agencies have knowledge sets across search, social, programmatic, publisher, AMB programs, and more. They also have access to cross-client benchmarking, meaning they know what’s “normal” for B2B clients in a variety of spaces. Those are all things that an in-house team would find hard to come by.
On top of that, agencies often have negotiating power with certain partners due to other client relationships and spend.
Agency Project Managers have numerous years of experience and expertise in a wide range of project types and functions, all specific to marketing. Most In-House PMO Departments have only general PM experience, suited more for internal organization projects, not performance marketing efforts.
That means if your company does not have a PMO, you’re likely to be saddled with project managing your efforts yourself. That’s something no marketing manager or marketing team wants on their plate.
An agency Project Manager not only acts as the cohesive leader of the agency teams and subject matter experts but can also help the client with organizing their operations as well.
Proposing the creation of an in-house marketing team may have the best of intentions, but the pitfalls are numerous and nearly impossible to avoid. Not to mention it’s expensive and takes years of trial and error. We’d be remiss in saying that it can never work, in some specific and very lucky instances, it does.
The question you have to ask yourself is, do you want to take that very expensive risk? Before you do, let us show you what a B2B marketing partner can do for your business.