Hiring an In-House Marketing Team vs an Agency
Business owners can either hire their own employees, or hire an outside agency to handle marketing. You might think that having your own employees that know your specific products and services best is the answer. However, there are many benefits to hiring a marketing agency.
If you have an internal marketing team, all they will focus on is your brand. While there are benefits to that immersion, employees focusing on the same brands and tasks every day may eventually lead them into a creative rut. A marketing agency has many clients in different fields so they are always creating new ideas and new strategies to help their clients. When an agency first meets with you, they are like a consumer; seeing your products from a fresh perspective. A great agency can look back on successful strategies from their long list of success stories and tailor solutions exactly to your situation.
Speaking of successful strategies, marketing agencies typically have employees from many different backgrounds and skill sets. When hiring in-house, business owners tend to hire folks that have a wide skillset. But if you know a little about a lot of things, you can’t become the master of one. Marketing agencies have specialists: graphic designers, creative strategists, web developers, social media strategists, copywriters, and others that focus on their own area of expertise. Agencies like Chatter hone our specific skills every day and know how our contributions fit into the greater plan.
Marketing agencies have to keep up with the latest technologies and strategies to do their job. They invest significant resources to make sure they are adapting to the latest trends while providing tried and true strategies. Business owners and in-house marketers are not always aware of the latest trends and often lack the resources to stay on top of an ever-changing landscape. Also, marketing agencies are fast! They have many hands on each project so it can be created, proofed, and executed as soon as possible.
What if you want to grow? What if you need to hire a new employee to fulfill your needs? That can get very expensive. Not only do you have to pay a salary, you have to search for a new employee and train them, hoping they stay with you for many years. If you have a marketing agency on tap, all you have to do is present your new needs and the agency can provide a plan with costs agreed to up front. For the cost of one employee, you could implement a fairly large marketing strategy.
But the most important factor for most business owners is cost. Sometimes the choice is easy. If you don’t have enough marketing needs to hire a full-timer, for instance only needing small projects throughout the year, going with a marketing agency is usually a no-brainer. But the decision is harder if you have a large year-round marking budget. Companies should calculate how many in-house people it would take to form a marketing team, and how much salaries would cost. Not only salaries, but the expenses of hiring, training, insurance, benefits, etc. Then you have to figure in the costs of ad spending and execution. To determine the costs of agencies, send a detailed list of needs to several agencies and review the proposals you get back. If the costs are comparable, or even slightly higher to go with the agency, hopefully this informative article will convince you that tried and true marketing agencies like Chatter are worth the extra investment, and provide the best results.