Firstly, let's address the elephant in the room. Yes, we are a digital marketing agency. But do we think that every brand is better off using an agency than having their marketing in-house? Nope. It would be better for our sales if we pushed that narrative, but we know that truthfully that isn’t the case.
Some businesses thrive with in-house marketing while others are better off boosting their efforts with an agency like ours - let’s go over the pros and cons of each and help you figure out what’s best for your business.
In-House Marketing:
Pros:
- Deep Brand Understanding: Nobody gets your brand or business quite like your team. Being immersed in the business brings a deep understanding that can’t be replicated.
- Immediate Accessibility: Having your marketing team sitting across the room from you allows for quick responses to emerging trends or issues, and ensures alignment across the whole team.
- Oversight: When your team is close by, you can oversee work as it happens and make sure you step in early with feedback if you see things going in a direction you don’t like.
Cons:
- Limited Expertise: your team may lack specialised skills in certain areas of digital marketing, such as SEO, PPC, or content creation.
- Resource Constraints: Limited manpower could limit what you’re able to achieve and how quickly you can achieve it. When you’re doing all the doing, you may not have time left to think strategically or be up-to-date with the ever changing digital landscape. Did you know about GA4, cookie-less tracking, and trends in Meta before it was crunch time? Perhaps not if you didn’t have the bandwidth within your in-house team.
- Risk of Tunnel Vision: After working together for a long time, you may find your team lacking in inspiration or struggling to bring fresh ideas to the table. This is kryptonite to innovation and change.
- Hiring and talent sourcing: It can be time-consuming and tricky to hire the talent you need to cover the wide breadth of skills and expertise you need to build a well-rounded marketing team. If your business is small, you might also find it difficult to find someone skilled enough but who is willing to work the part-time hours you need to start with.
Working with a Digital Marketing Agency:
Pros:
- Access to Specialised Expertise: When you engage a digital marketing agency, you typically get access to people with years of experience and expertise (that’s certainly the case at ours), who are up to date with the latest trends and platform changes.
- Flexibility and Agility: Sometimes the marketing needs of a business can be a little inconsistent. If you’re launching a website, new product or service, you’ll need extra help. Digital marketing agencies typically have the scope to flex up as your needs increase, while an individual on your team may struggle to adapt to the increase in requirements.
- Innovation and inspiration: When you work with an agency, you work with a team that is constantly drawing on the learnings they gain from their other clients, and bringing those learnings and inspiration to your strategy. A fresh set of brains will be able to see problems from different angles or identify problems or opportunities that you might not have thought about.
Cons:
- Cost Considerations: The hourly rate of an in-house team member is likely to be less than that of a digital marketing agency, so if you need a full-time equivalent of work under a single role, in-house might be a better option.
- Communication Challenges: Some businesses struggle to develop a clear line of communication that is crucial when working with an agency. If you want to reach your goals, your team must be on the same page - fortunately with tools like Slack and Zoom, quick digital communication has never been more seamless.
- Transparency: It’s hard to know exactly what an agency is up to and how they’re using their time. If your agency charges by the hour, it’s that they’re transparent about what they’re doing during those hours. Some agencies will provide you with timesheets, while others (like ours) will use a time tracking tool that gives complete oversight of time usage, but others won’t make it so transparent.
- Empty promises: Some of our clients have come to us with horror stories about agencies that promised them the world, got them set up with new tools and then left them high and dry once it comes to ongoing support. To avoid this, you need to find an agency that is truly invested in your vision.
As you can see, there’s a whole lot of pros and cons for both having your marketing in-house and working with a digital marketing agency. What’s best for you will totally depend on your needs and your business requirements.
But let's look at one more thing. We haven’t talked about what we think is the holy grail situation - the one that sees our clients thriving most: a hybrid model. We work with a lot of businesses that have in-house marketing teams, but they recognise the limitations of those teams. They have limited resources or limited skills, but they do have a deep understanding of the brand and they have a vision.
When those in-house teams join forces with a skilled and agile digital marketing agency, that’s when the magic happens. In-house marketing teams can share their deep business understanding with digital marketing agencies, meaning those agencies can bring their innovation and expertise to the table even more effectively. We love this type of partnership.
So there you have it. Hopefully, this article has been able to give you some clarity on the pros and cons of working with a digital marketing agency vs keeping your marketing in-house.
Written by Felicity Douglas
Co-owner and performance lead at Sea Digital
