Why an Internal Marketing Team Doesn’t Make Sense for Your Business

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!