Agency vs. In-House Team

Services

Needless to say, the marketers you hire on staff will have a set number of skills and services they can provide. If you hire a designer, don’t expect him or her to write a copy—you’d need to hire a copywriter for that. Ramping up your in-house team quickly for a release or marketing push is difficult because your ideas are bound to your specialties. With an agency, ideas can flourish, and strategic direction can be set without limits based on a team’s proficiencies. What’s more, when working through a problem with an agency, you gain its collective wisdom. Established agencies have not only encountered a wide range of scenarios and challenges but also have tested and experimented with an assortment of tactics and channels—turning your emergency into just another day at the office.
Advantage: Agency

Brand and Industry Knowledge

Nobody understands your business better than your own people do. Although agencies can profess their impending commitment when you sign the contract, they can’t hold a candle to the on-staff marketer who has an unyielding grasp of your company’s product, industry, history, vision, goals, and competitors. Your people live it every day and what agencies can provide in an outside perspective, they lack background knowledge. Depending on how niche your industry is, it may take an agency some time to get up to speed, and even then, internal staff will always have more immediate access to in-house experts and can, in turn, produce more in-depth, technical, and authoritative content.
Advantage: In-house team

Perspective

Ever wonder why so many brands wind up producing content that feels overly promotional? The answer is tunnel vision. Some in-house marketers struggle to take a step back and think objectively about their brand, which makes it incredibly difficult to truly get in the heads of their audience. The result is content that speaks to the company’s goals, not the audience’s needs. A digital marketing company can provide an outside perspective on the content interests of your target audience(s) and isn’t influenced by internal biases that may affect the strategic direction. On top of that, experienced agencies will also identify areas in which your company needs improvement along with missed marketing opportunities, most of which can be difficult for internal teams to notice.
Advantage: Agency

Trends

Although a digital marketing agency will only devote a portion of the time that a full-time staffer could dedicate each month, the time it does spend is amplified. Seasoned agencies have firsthand knowledge of marketing trends across their entire client list—for decades. While on-staff marketers bring their personal comprehension and experience, that can’t match the insight agencies provide after spending thousands of man-hours testing new channels, techniques, and concepts, for not only their customers but also their own marketing as well.
Advantage: Agency

Process

Agencies use clear end-to-end processes as the foundation for every client relationship. They keep projects on schedule, reduce cost overages and hour creep, and help motivate creative minds to continually produce compelling content. The process provides structure—from planning to delivery—a systematic approach to control the chaos, ensure strategic decision-making, and avoid missed opportunities and deadlines. Although internal marketing teams can certainly develop and refine their own processes, they often rely upon other departments and priorities that compromise a methodical approach.
Advantage: Agency

Accessibility

Quick communications and turnarounds are crucial to a marketing campaign’s success. With in-house production, you can meet, collaborate, and exchange ideas on the fly rather than wrestle with conflicting schedules and timelines. While agencies attempt to loop clients in and collaborate often, it’s never as efficient as being under the same roof. Nothing is more satisfying than walking down the hall to have a conversation, and sometimes the games of the phone and email tag with an agency can slow everything down significantly.
Advantage: In-house team

Drive

When marketing the same business internally, day after day, it can become easy to lose sight of the overall goal and what matters most to your customers. In-house staff can suffer from debilitating stress caused by job demands, role conflict or ambiguity, and lack of support and feedback. The result is a burned-out, inefficient, and cynical employee. When you’re marketing content through an agency, however, you don’t need to worry about the people involved, just the outcome. Agencies have large teams to pull motivated creatives from, constantly mentor and guide employees to reduce stress, and even have “non-burnout” policies in place that encourage career development, ongoing education, and a healthy work-life balance.
Advantage: Agency

Flexibility

Consider all the costs that come with hiring full-time content marketers. There’s the recruitment, base-level salary, benefits (about 30 percent of an employee’s overall cost), software licenses, onboarding support, and ongoing training. Then there is always a risk the employees won’t work out, and then you’re back to square one. By comparison, agency pricing typically falls under one of three models: monthly retainer (70 percent of agency/client relationships), per project, or per hour. This model gives businesses much greater flexibility in their marketing dollars and allows you to determine the precise level of support and services you require.
Advantage: Agency

Scale

In-house teams are rigid and incapable of scaling for a company’s growing demands. To be effective, content marketing must ramp up quickly to meet customer and business demands. If you need a team of extra designers and writers for a product launch push, it’s as easy as increasing your monthly hours with an agency—as opposed to the costs and time it takes to find and train just one capable employee.
Advantage: Agency

Hybrid

This isn’t an “agency or bust” situation. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to digital marketing, and every business is unique. In fact, many companies allow their in-house and agency teams to collaborate, outsourcing certain tasks while keeping others internal. For example, under this hybrid model, your in-house team may handle strategy and promotion while production is run through an agency.
Advantage: Tie