It’s that point in the year (how?!) when you might be starting to think about your marketing plans for 2025, planning budgets, themes, campaigns, and possibly even the structure of your team.
Deciding whether to employ / expand an in-house marketing team, or outsource to an agency is a common predicament, and there’s no right or wrong answer, it will depend on lots of things from the nature of your business to your available resources and what you want to achieve. There’s also the option to combine an in-house team with an agency.
You’d be forgiven for thinking I might have a biassed view on this (especially given the header image I’ve used), but I can see the merit in both approaches, so I’ll try and stay as objective as possible as we explore the pros and cons of each and in what scenario each works best.
The advantages of using an agency
- An outside perspective is often valuable – most industries develop their own jargon, and then on top of this most companies have their own version of this jargon, almost like a local dialect! Working with an agency can help you to see how your marketing comes across to an audience who don’t have the same knowledge you do. Having a more objective view means they’ll also be able to provide insight into what’s newsworthy and what isn’t, so from a PR perspective, enlisting the help of an agency is always a wise move.
- Marketing is prioritised – a common challenge in-house marketing teams face is getting pulled into other tasks, such as operational duties. However if you have a retainer with an agency it forces those marketing plans to go ahead.
- More cost-effective – with things like overheads, equipment and holiday pay to consider, it costs an average of two-to-three times someone’s salary to employ them, so a whole team requires a considerable investment. Whilst an agency will charge a higher hourly rate, you’re only ever paying for their time, not their sick pay, annual leave or national insurance.
- Easier to scale up and down – it’s much more of a commitment to hire someone than to appoint an agency. If things aren’t working out with your agency, or you need to cut budgets, it’s fairly easy to end a contract, whereas letting an employee go is a longer (and not particularly enjoyable) process. With an agency you may choose to up your spend for key events or parts of the year, giving you more flexibility and control.
- Access to marketing software and tools – unless you’re a very large company, you might not have subscriptions to key marketing tools that allow you to do things like assess the technical health of your site, your link profile, or your organic visibility, but one of the advantages of working with an agency is being able to use this key information.
- Learnings from other sectors – the chances are, your agency will work with clients in various different sectors, and may have fresh ideas that can be applied to your industry too. They’ll have tried-and-tested experiences that can save time and help your marketing efforts become more effective.
- Support with recruitment and training – some businesses struggle to recruit the right talent, perhaps because of their location. By working with an agency you can have access to the right people without employing them directly. If you do decide to hire a team as well, they may even be able to support you in training new staff.
- Specialist knowledge – if you’re only hiring one marketer, or a very small team, they need to be able to wear a few different hats, which often means that while they’ll have a good understanding of marketing as a whole, they might not have in-depth knowledge in each channel, whilst an agency is likely to be able to cover all bases.
The advantages of an in-house marketing team
- They know your business and industry inside out – this can’t be underestimated. Understanding your industry inside out helps you create better marketing campaigns and your employees will not only live and breathe it all day every day, but be surrounded by other people who live and breathe it all day, from other departments who offer important perspectives. This could be especially key within technical or highly regulated sectors. Of course, with a proper on-boarding system for agencies, you can still achieve this, and it’s less important for ads or technical SEO than say content or PR.
- Keeping updated with changes in your business – having an in-house team also makes it easier to keep up with updates about your company. With all the best intentions in the world, someone can forget to pass on information, but if your team is in your building, chances are they’ll hear it from someone at some stage, even if it’s an overheard conversation. Social media can be a channel that’s easier managed in-house because so much of it relates to company updates, plus any inbound enquiries through social channels will often need to be passed on to your customer service or sales teams.
- Immediate access – sometimes you might just need a few lines of copy quickly, or you may require someone to physically be there to film something or even to bounce ideas around outside of arranged meetings.
- Control over time – when you work with an agency, you might commit to a certain amount of time, or a set amount of work each month, but it’s unlikely you’ll have an arrangement over when that’s carried out. Whilst most agencies will be as flexible as they can and try to accommodate urgent requests as soon as possible, they will have other commitments, whereas you have a little more control over your team’s time and priorities.
Combining an in-house team with an agency can give you the best of both worlds. The key is to be strategic and organised about where everyone’s efforts best lie, and put in place the right working practices so you’re collaborating together as one unit.
