Your business is growing, and it’s time to make a bigger investment in your marketing. It’s time to start thinking, “Should I hire an internal marketing team or a marketing agency?”

There are certainly perks to having an internal team:

• They can become deeply familiar with your business – Internal teams work among your employees for forty or more hours a week. They’ll learn your routines and garner a solid understanding of your company behind-the-scenes.
• They can dedicate all their work hours to your company – Your internal workers can spend every minute of every working day concentrating solely on projects bound to your company.

But we’re partial, as you might expect, to hiring an agency to do your marketing for you – and we’ll show you why.

(This post has been updated from an earlier post written by the 2017 Leverage Marketing Content Team lead, Madeline Jacobson.)

You have too much work for a small in-house team to handle

If you’re operating a startup, you may currently be dividing marketing responsibilities amongst a small team – even if marketing isn’t part of your employees’ primary duties. As you begin to ramp up your marketing efforts, the workload may become too heavy for your current employees to handle, which could lead to missed deadlines and – the ultimate profit-killer – burnout.

At this point, your options are to hire more employees and build up a marketing department or outsource your marketing to an agency.

You don’t have room in your marketing budget to hire a full in-house team

There’s more to a marketing team than you might initially think – but every team has to start somewhere. Let’s assume you want to assemble a team from the very beginning. At the bare minimum, an in-house digital marketing team typically includes:

• An Analyst ($80,000 per year) – We’re being generous here. You should really have at least two analysts, one for paid search and advertising and another for search engine optimization to ensure that your efforts aren’t a waste.
• A Content Creator ($65,000 per year) – There’s no internet without content, and you’ll need at least one professional to manage the creation of all your content so that you maintain a certain quality standard for search engines and customers.
• A Social Media Manager ($51,000 per year) – Companies have a huge role to play in social media. It’s so huge, in fact, that you’ll need a full-time social media manager to keep up with only a few social media channels.

Salaries provided are estimates based on average salaries from Indeed and Payscale. That’s already almost $200,000 per year that you will be putting toward marketing. Plus, the number doesn’t factor in things like employee benefits and marketing software.

If the cost of in-house employee salaries alone will meet or exceed your marketing budget, you are better off making the cost-effective decision to work with an agency. Marketing agencies typically charge clients monthly, and services can often be tailored to meet the your budget.

You don’t have time for a lengthy hiring process

Your company is growing quickly and you know that you need to expand your marketing efforts, but you don’t have weeks on end to look for the ideal in-house candidates.

Even if you do make a hire relatively quickly, it will still take time for your new employee to receive training and become familiar with your company. And if you make a hire too hastily and end up with someone who can’t handle the job responsibilities, you have to go through the time-consuming and costly hiring process all over again.

Although the process of hiring an agency and familiarizing your dedicated team with your business also takes some effort, the time to hire is almost always significantly shorter. Agencies spend their entire working days creating marketing campaigns for their clients, and a professional agency will be able to pick up your marketing remarkably quickly.

You don’t have the right marketing talent in your geographic area

If your business isn’t located in a major metropolitan area with a thriving marketing and communications industry, you may have trouble attracting qualified jobseekers to your open in-house marketing positions.

Fortunately, any quality digital marketing agency will have the resources necessary to effectively communicate with you from a remote location, so you can choose the best talent available with no geographic restrictions.

Your business has a lot of seasonal fluctuations

If you have a busy season and an off season, your marketing budget may change significantly from quarter to quarter, and it might not make sense to have an in-house marketing team that is overworked part of the year and on standby when your marketing budget decreases. Your money is going to waste if you’re not using it to maintain or grow your business.

With a satellite marketing agency, you can easily scale your marketing efforts up or down by adding or decreasing the number of team members on your account.

You want to manage your marketing team less often

Sure, keeping your team in-house means you have them physically on hand when you need them. But a satellite marketing agency is only a phone call, message, or email away, and they don’t need to be micromanaged.

Marketing agencies are trained, experienced, and set up to handle marketing campaigns back-to-front with little or no management. Their job is to make marketing easy for you so you spend less time solving problems remotely and more time focusing on large-scale tasks.

The teams at agencies work hard to minimize meetings, maximize results, and make reporting simple and straightforward. If you enjoy working rather than managing, consider the perks of a strong marketing agency.

Want to learn more about why other businesses just like yours choose an off-site digital marketing team? Download our awesome In-House vs. Agency infographic right now!

Marketing agencies and in-house marketing teams don’t have to be like oil and water. In fact, a good partnership between agency and in-house team members can be more of a peanut butter and jelly relationship.

Food idioms aside, it’s becoming more and more common for startups and large corporations alike to partner with marketing agencies, even if they already have an in-house marketing department. That’s because agencies can bring in additional resources and skill sets that might not exist in-house—and handle some of the time- and labor-intensive marketing activities that may be eating up too many company hours.

If you’re considering bringing in an agency as an extension of your own team, there are steps you can take to ensure that your marketing campaigns run like butter (that’s the last food cliché, I promise). When meeting with your new agency partner, you’ll need to determine how and when you’ll communicate, what tools you’ll use to collaborate, and how your team members will exchange knowledge.

Establishing Communication

You don’t want to feel like you’re shouting into a void whenever you reach out to your marketing agency, and your agency team members don’t want to feel that way, either. To avoid unnecessary frustration, it’s important to establish a communication plan early on.

It’s a good idea to set up a recurring monthly meeting to touch base, discuss strategy, and review the past month’s efforts. If you and your agency are working on a particularly big campaign, you may even want to meet weekly or bi-monthly.

Face-to-face meetings can be beneficial, but they’re not essential (especially if your agency is located halfway across the country). At Leverage, we use Sococo (a virtual office space) and GoToMeeting (a video conferencing tool) to meet with many of our clients. Both these tools allow us to have multiple people on a call share screens so that we can all look at the same presentations.

In addition to scheduling regular meetings, you should also establish a plan for communicating whenever something pressing comes up. Make sure you know who your point people are at your marketing agency and in-house so that you always have a clear channel of communication. Both in-house and agency team members should make it a goal to respond to emails within at least one business day.

Choosing Tools for Collaboration

Online collaboration tools make it easy for agencies and in-house marketing departments to collaborate and share documents, and the good news is, most marketing agencies already invest in some collaboration and project management tools.

At Leverage, for example, we use the project management system Teamwork to collaborate internally, but we can also give our clients access so that they can view specific files, notes, and task lists for their business. (Basecamp is another popular tool that some agencies and in-house marketing departments use.)

When it comes to file sharing, there are fortunately several free options available. Basic Dropbox is free, and if you need more advanced sharing features and additional storage, you can get Dropbox Pro or Business for a small monthly fee. Google Drive also provides another simple and free way for agencies and in-house departments to share text documents, graphics, spreadsheets, videos, and presentations.

If you’re looking for even more collaboration tools to meet the needs of a specific campaign or your company’s project management style, Hubspot has a list of 18 good ones.

Exchanging Knowledge (and Resources)

Complementary knowledge is one of the ultimate benefits of an agency teaming up with an in-house marketing department. An agency may have access to enterprise software, such as Marin (a cross-channel advertising platform), that they can use to help your business make better-informed marketing decisions. Your agency team members may also bring with them a more advanced knowledge of Google Analytics and other tools that your company is already using, allowing your company to use those tools more effectively.

Meanwhile, your in-house marketing team brings to the table a deeper understanding of your company, your competitors, your target audience, and your industry. In order to make sure your marketing agency succeeds in their responsibilities, your in-house team needs to be able to successfully share their knowledge, whether that’s through reports, presentations, interviews, or even making products available for agency team members to test.

Here are a few other things your internal team should be sharing with your marketing agency:

• Existing content style guides or notes on your brand voice
• Your marketing initiatives calendar
• Media files (e.g. company photos, videos, slideshow, or webinars that you want to promote)
• Updates on your product launches, technology advances, upcoming webinars or talks you’re presenting, and other company news
• Sales and lead data (so your agency knows how their campaigns are doing)

Agency and In-House: Together at Last

There’s no reason that marketing agencies and in-house marketing teams need to be at odds, especially with the wide range of communication and collaboration tools available. Both in-house and agency team members can provide different strengths, allowing your company to expand your digital marketing efforts in a cost-effective manner.

Want to learn more about how Leverage Marketing collaborates with in-house marketing teams? Contact us, and we’ll schedule a call at a time that works for you.