Agencies have staffing specialists for everything from SEO to content strategy, social media, PPC and even email campaigns. With the additional capacity, a marketing agency can typically implement a wider range of marketing campaigns faster than an in-house team of one or two people. Marketing requires creative minds that thrive on change, and an internal agency focused only on your brand can become stagnant unless you build a culture that counteracts it from the start. Agencies are well-versed in the best practices of almost every marketing tactic.
They are professionals who have worked on countless accounts. Advertising agencies can work much more efficiently than an in-house marketing team assembled. Because outsourced marketing agencies take care of so much work, they have state-of-the-art workflows and processes designed to deliver quality, volume and efficiency. Agencies often have access to the best talent in the world.
Internal teams have more control over all the content they generate compared to marketing agencies. They know what to design, when to design them, and they can monitor ads without agency reports. It totally depends on your business. If you can afford to hire a multitude of people with different skills, and have enough work for all of them, then an in-house marketing team would be the best option.
If you only need to manage one aspect, hiring a single internal employee also works. If you are looking to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy, an agency may make more sense. While agencies learn their brand and spend time on their marketing strategy, they also focus on other customers and their marketing needs. If you're looking for the best use of your marketing budget, an experienced agency can often offer. As presented in the Journal of Marketing Management, inefficient communication between a company and an agency is one of the main reasons for slow execution and low productivity in a client-agency collaboration.
Typically, marketing agencies stick to communication by email or phone as needed, while facilitating weekly or monthly meetings to discuss results, projections, quarterly plans, etc. Naturally, agencies are already equipped with knowledgeable professionals who specialize in all areas of digital marketing. While an agency can be much slower than having a team available, depending on its workload and client list, an agency can have a beneficial “outside” perspective. So, if you ever needed complementary marketing services (think along the lines of writing customer service scripts, video production, traditional PR services), your best bet would be to take advantage of an agency. In some cases, digital marketing agencies will also have marketing software that can make it easier to measure and track your online marketing campaign. Companies with internal agencies form a marketing team to develop, manage and maintain the digital marketing strategy that best suits their business.
In addition, the internal marketing team has the ability to focus on the big picture or the tasks they do best while you draw specific channels and researchers to specialized digital agencies. According to statistics from Adweek, companies of all sizes have reduced creative content production costs by more than 30% simply by shifting responsibility from external agency partners to in-house marketing and creative teams. Rather than choosing between internal marketing or an agency, it is important to explore the third path which consists of internal marketing and digital agencies together. While you can continue to invest in tools like these when you partner with a digital marketing agency, you can often count on your agency to have a set of tools. When business owners and senior marketing leaders debate whether to invest in an agency or add another internal employee to their marketing department, there are many considerations worth considering. In short, discussions about internal marketing versus the agency could be justified by the basic rule of how you can manage options in the short and long term.
Naturally, a full-time internal employee invests much more in the success and growth of a company than any external agency team.
