In this day and age, digital marketing has become a necessity for businesses to promote their brand, products, and services. This is why companies from left and right are trying to come up with the best campaign to compete for people’s attention online.
As important as digital marketing is, many business owners are still weighing their options on whether they should hire a digital marketing agency or settle with having an in-house team. To help you decide on this matter, below is a quick comparison of these two choices.
Familiarity with Brand
In-House: Having an in-house team offers great familiarity with your brand. Since they are working under your company, they fully understand what messaging and persona to use. They have a better grasp of what you’d like to portray and how you want your audience to perceive your organisation. Simply put, a team of your own knows your business from the inside out.
Agency: As compared to an in-house team, a search marketing agency might take some time familiarising themselves with your brand. The process often requires you to introduce and orient the agency about the core values, tone, and every relevant information that would allow them to get to know your company.
Knowledge & Skills
In-House: Having a fully established in-house team takes time. Before you can start off with anything, you need to make sure that you have the right people. For starters, it’s not easy to find digital marketers that have extensive experience in the field. Since they have the knowledge and skills, most of these experts choose to build their own agency or, if not, are already employed to another company.
If you choose to build your marketing department by hiring internally, you still have to train them so they have all the necessary skill sets the job requires them.
Agency: Partnering with an agency means having access to some of the most seasoned digital marketers in the industry. You have the advantage of hiring a digital marketing agency that has an extensive background in your market. You may also pick out a firm based on the type of marketing service they specialise in. For example, you only want to focus on SEO or running a social media campaign for a period of time.
Working with an experienced partner will help your business get the most value and return on investment (ROI) from digital marketing. Additionally, an experienced agency can deliver results based on what you’ve asked of them.
Tools & Resources
In-House: If you opt to have an internal marketing team, you’ll also have to find and get all the required SEO tools for whatever type of campaign you choose to do. Say you’re planning to have a full-blown SEO campaign, investing in decent and accurate auditing and tracking tools is a must to get things running.
Agency: When you hire an online marketing agency, you only pay for the services you want from them. Purchasing tools and other applications the job requires are covered by them. Since this is their primary area of expertise, they already have all the marketing software they need to measure, track, and set up your campaign.
Diverse Specialties
In-House: For an in-house team, there might be limitations on the amount of things your people can do. Unless you manage to hire a team member who knows his/her ways around all types of digital marketing, you could probably enjoy a diverse speciality. However, even in that aspect, it can be a little too overwhelming to have one person do everything at once.
Agency: In terms of expertise and specialisation, an agency is proven to be more flexible. Since they are a company dedicated to providing all types of digital marketing services, they could offer an array of solutions to their clients. This allows you to take advantage of multiple marketing channels, from paid to organic sources.
Overall Cost
In-House: Establishing an in-house marketing team doesn’t come cheap. One must consider this idea as a huge investment especially since you’ll have to hire and pay people. On average, the expected salary of a digital marketing manager is around 100,000NZD every month. That’s aside from the payout of other team members in the team. Usually, you’ll need an SEO specialist, social media strategist, and digital marketing specialist to keep the team up and running.
Agency: Although an agency is not a free service. If you compare it to the overall cost of building an in-house team, this option is more cost-effective. They typically bill you depending on the services you avail. In addition, if you choose to have two or more of their services, they might even offer package plans which are usually priced competitively.
Before deciding whether you would entrust your marketing campaign to an agency or have it done by your team, be sure you’ve fully weighed the pros and cons of each option. Use this list as your guide to finding out which among the choices you have would benefit you the most.
