Should you work with a digital marketing agency or keep it in-house?
Particularly with the increase in marketing automation and AI tools, you may be wondering whether your marketing is best managed by an agency or your internal team.
The answer to this question varies depending on factors such as business size, internal resources and several other factors, which only makes the answer more elusive. So, in this article, we’ll dive into why you may or may not consider working with an agency and what to look for if you do.
Benefits of working with a digital marketing agency
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1. Improved employee focus
Especially if you don’t have dedicated marketing team members in-house, partnering with an agency can increase your team’s productivity as they’re no longer needing to juggle marketing tasks in addition to their primary role.
An effective agency should feel like an extension of your team, freeing up your internal capacity to work on other elements of your business and working with you to achieve your goals faster.
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2. Fresh perspectives and innovation
Agencies have the advantage of being able to implement marketing strategies across a range of industries and markets, often leading to perspectives and insights that are more difficult for internal marketers to gain.
Added to this is the ever increasing speed of innovation of various AI tools and marketing automation options. Sure, you could test a bunch of these tools yourself and see which ones are useful or not… or, you let someone else put in the hours to work it out and then just pay for the actual hours they’re working on your campaign. On this one, the answer is likely that a bit of both are good.
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3. Access to specialised skills and expertise
Several years ago, I renovated a house and the painting had been an ongoing saga, until I hired some professionals to help. It was amazing how much faster and simpler it was for them, with everything from techniques to the equipment they used. What I lacked was both skills and experience in painting, so everything I did took longer and wasn’t quite as good.
Marketing is a lot like that… and more so, with a wide range of skills needed from areas such as campaign strategy, technical SEO, on-page SEO, ad copy writing, ad targeting, ad image creation, conversion rate optimisation and much more.
For the cost of hiring one internal marketer, working with an experienced agency can give you access to a broader range of specialists and expertise.
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4. Faster campaign execution
With established processes and systems to streamline campaign development and implementation, agencies will typically be able to get you to market much faster than trying to launch a campaign in-house.
The key factor here is that creating and implementing a campaign can be quite complex and has a lot of components. If you don’t have a team that is experienced in managing all of these, you’ll save a lot of time by hiring one that does.
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5. Improved speed of optimisation
As agencies are dealing with multiple clients across a range of industries, before they even start your campaign, they have a head start in understanding a range of different factors influencing your market. This typically makes the optimisation of your campaign faster and is why businesses often report that working with agencies improved their conversion rates when compared to in-house efforts (source: HubSpot)
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6. Better content marketing strategy
From understanding the right content formats to use for your target audience across different channels, to which channels are best to focus on, agencies have several advantages in the creation and implementation of your content marketing strategy.
When you may not want to work with an agency
So, there’s clearly a number of businesses that can benefit from working with the right agency… but there’s also times where it may not be the best decision, at least for a period of time.
Times where you may not want to work with a digital marketing agency
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1. When you’re starting a new business
When starting a business, you should have a clear plan of how you’re going to generate revenue and then prove that the model works… often by hustling and getting some sales.
The challenge is that if you try to market your business before this, it’s going to be far less efficient and consume more of your startup capital than it should. So, unless your selected agency is helping with a clear go to market strategy and is firmly focused on your ROI requirements, it’s much easier to work with an agency after you’ve started to generate sales directly.
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2. If you don’t have clearly defined goals
When you’re hiring a new team member, you’ll typically start by creating a job description. Similarly, to find the right agency and measure their effectiveness, you’ll want to define the objective that you’re trying to reach.
By putting a number to your growth goals, then you’re much better positioned to discuss the strategy to get there.
If this is an area that you’re working on, our article on how to set a marketing budget based on your customers’ lifetime value could help.
The hybrid approach
As an agency, we clearly have a bit of bias on the topic of whether or not agencies are a good idea, although having seen a wide range of agencies, we highly recommend being clear on your goals and expectations to help filter through your options.
Another thing we advocate is a hybrid approach to the question of whether or not to work with an agency. This is where you work with an agency for all of the reasons listed above, but as your business grows, you also build your internal marketing capacity… if suitable, with the support of your agency.
For many businesses, this provides a scalable and adaptable solution, particularly if there is a good relationship between your internal team and the agency you’re working with.
Ultimately, it would be great if your team had all of the marketing expertise in-house, which then handled the large majority of your marketing requirements, and for large businesses, this is often the best solution.
Five keys to finding the right digital marketing agency for your business
- Understands your requirements and sets KPIs based on these
- Demonstrates a clear return on investment
- Works well with you and your team
- Represents your brand well
- Uses technology and AI to improve output, not just cut corners
If your prospective agency meets all of the above criteria, they could be a valuable partner in reaching your objectives.
What could an agency help your team accomplish?
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