You’ve had a world-shaking business idea. You created a unique product or service that solves an unaddressed customer pain point, and now your organization is ready to take the company live and start making a difference for your target audience. Now it’s all about bridging the gap between your company’s products/services and your potential customers.
The decision to market is easy; all organizations need a way to represent their services consistently and intelligently. However, the decision between when to use in-house marketing talent and when to hire a professional agency can prove to be difficult. Our In-House vs. Marketing Agency comparison will give you the information you need to get started with your marketing strategy.
Building an In-House Marketing Team
Hiring and developing an in-house marketing team for your organization comes with its own set of benefits including:
- Operational familiarity with your business.
- Established marketing and sales alignment.
- Opportunities to nurture and grow personnel from within the organization.
The biggest advantage of building an in-house marketing team is the familiarity that they will have with your business’s goals, vision and culture. An in-house marketer will develop intimate knowledge of the product or service that you are promoting. In-house marketers may also be more aligned with the sales team, as it’s easier for the two to stay in frequent contact and collaborate on messaging and marketing campaigns.
Overall, the close relationship between in-house marketing staff and the company as a whole can be advantageous when considering marketing strategy.
On the downside, in-house marketing can also present several limitations.
Most importantly, smaller and medium-sized companies typically lack the budget and resources required to hire and train marketing professionals that cover a variety of skills.
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To execute an integrated marketing plan, including messaging, strategy, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, web design, social media, content development and more, would require multiple employees with specializations in several different areas.
Additionally, in-house marketing personnel are likely to be so busy with their day-to-day tasks that adding new, larger projects could prove difficult if not impossible to execute and if one of your team members decides to move on to another opportunity, it could significantly impact your team’s progress to achieve its marketing goals.
Hiring a Marketing Agency
Working with a marketing agency comes with several unique benefits, including but certainly not limited to:
- Deep expertise across a wide array of marketing subjects.
- Ability to jump in and drive immediate impact on business goals.
- Exceptional capabilities of taking on and managing multiple projects across various marketing channels (i.e. overall strategy, messaging, social media, SEO, email marketing, marketing automation, content development, etc.).
- Proven ability to quickly fill in resource gaps in fast-faced startup and growing company environments.
A marketing agency could be the ideal solution for companies looking to develop a complete marketing strategy before implementing campaigns aimed at generating leads. Particularly in smaller businesses, in-house marketers may lack the skillset or experience needed to conceptualize and then executive comprehensive marketing strategies. An agency, on the other hand, will be fully staffed with experts who can fluidly move in and out of projects to provide expertise in a broad variety of areas.
Additionally, marketing agencies have the time and resources to complete large projects that in-house marketers may find too time consuming and overwhelming. Agencies can have multiple specialists brought in to execute on your marketing plan, whereas in-house marketers usually have limited bandwidth to take on new initiatives while maintaining their current activities. Time is a big hurdle to overcome when sudden deadlines and events arise that need immediate action.
A potential consideration is that marketing agencies may seem expensive to smaller organizations and start-ups. It can be hard to justify the initial investment, though the missed revenue on lost leads costs organizations significantly. Additionally, it takes time and research to find the right marketing agency.