Answer these 4 quick questions and you’d know if your in-house marketing team is well-suited for digital marketing.
#1 Do you have the resources to create effective digital marketing strategies and moreover execute them well?
#2 Do you have great writers who can churn out beautiful content?
#3 Do you have a strategy in place for tracking and analyzing the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign?
#4 Will your marketing team be able to manage changes in the age of digital transformation?
Well, you have your answer right here. But we believe it’s our responsibility to guide you in an unprejudiced way, so let us talk about the pros and cons of an in-house team and a digital marketing agency for you to decide on your own.
How well the internal resource or an agency fares has quite a few aspects attached to it. Let’s take a look at where who works well.
PROWESS
Industry Knowledge
You and your people understand the core of your business better than anyone else. But agencies have the in-depth industry knowledge due to their diverse work portfolio and a 360 degree view as they see it from the top.
Services
For every service you require, you will have to hire a person with the right skill-set. So if you need a design then you will need to hire a designer, a writer, a developer to integrate the page on your site/app and lastly an SEO expert to optimize that page. Also, if that design doesn’t influence then you have to go through the process again.
Established agencies already have the required resources and a process to go about it.
Trends
A full-time staffer might put in more hours than an agency would, but an internal resource will not be able to bring the firsthand knowledge of marketing trends and experience as a seasoned agency could.
FINESSE
Approach
From planning to delivery, agencies adhere to a defined process that ensures strategic work. An internal team too can develop and refine their processes, but they are dependent on other departments and that could result in compromising on their work.
Availability
A campaign’s success is hugely dependent on quick turnaround and instant communications. With an in-house team, you have an advantage of collaborating and exchanging ideas whenever required. The same advantage can be gained with an agency as they are accountable for their work and a plus is that they are up about challenges and ideas, they do it day in and day out.
Ambition
Doing the same kind of thing every day out can lead to losing focus of the overall goal. It could get too much for an in-house staff with the ambiguity, dependency and lack of coordination. But when you hire an agency your only concern is the outcome. Agencies work with a large team and constantly mentor and motivate employees to come up with novel ideas.
INVESTMENT
Latitude
Hiring an in-house digital marketing team, the marketing tools, training, software license and required support can be a costly deal. Also, there’s always the risk of employees not suiting your mark and starting over. In comparison, agencies typically prove to be inexpensive with their flexible hiring options of monthly/project/hourly basis depending on the level of services and support you require.
Scalability
Digital marketing is always evolving and so are business demands. It’ll be difficult for in-house teams to keep up with the growing demands. In case you require extra skills for a product launch or something you’d need to hire more employees while with an agency all you need to do is increase hours.
Diversified
Every business is unique and there’s never a one-size-fit-all. Agencies have a diversified outlook towards businesses while internal resources have a restricted view. Internal resources would focus on business goals more whereas agencies would focus on business goals as well as what the audiences are looking for.
Did you think we were a little biased about it? Quite possibly!
We as a digital marketing agency understand the demographics of it all. We work with clients’ day in and day out, even with those who have had an experience of an in-house digital marketing team so you can envisage where we are coming from.
Shifting from internal resources to an agency might seem like a challenge, but in the long run it is this much-needed shift that will bring you the desired output as not many in-house teams have either the resources or the expertise a seasoned digital agency offers.
