When it comes to marketing strategies, brands often find themselves torn between choosing a marketing agency or hiring internally for their marketing efforts. These decisions can come down to many different factors: cost, efficiency, expertise, and resources. In this blog we will explore the benefits and challenges of both options. Let’s get started.
Marketing Agency
The Highlights
Access to Industry Leaders
Marketing agencies are known for finding the best of the best in their field. These are legacy marketers who have worked for several brands, including other agencies, and are consistently keeping up to date with trends and forecasting.
Abundant Resources and Network
Agencies are tasked with making the best of the best for their clients, and that includes utilizing their pool of resources and wide network to best network their clients. This can include state-of-the-art technology, market data and knowledge, that an internal marketing team may not have access or funds to achieve.
Consistent Focus on Marketing
A marketing agencies sole job is: marketing. While an internal team may be pulled in a million different directions throughout their company, a marketing agency is focused solely on your marketing needs and has ample time to address them. This can include industry trends and new platforms your internal team may not be informed of yet.
The Lowlights
Cost and Fees
When hiring an external agency that comes with a cost. For some brands, this cost can seem daunting for their marketing efforts, especially for smaller or start-up companies. Depending on cost to hire an internal marketing individual, this would be an important decision for brands to distinguish between when making a decision.
In-House Marketing
The Highlights
Familiarity with Brand
Having an in-house marketing team that is solely focused on your brand keeps a consistent focus on amplifying and marketing your product and business. Your internal team will eat, sleep and breathe your brand and it’s strategy – at a cost of course.
Accessibility
Having an internal marketing team makes it much simpler to connect with your marketing team – you could be sitting right next to them! Being able to have quick brainstorms across company including your marketing team allows for quick and constructive decision making that may take more coordination with an agency.
Brand Control
Keeping all marketing efforts internal allows your team to have complete brand control over messaging and strategies. Depending on the size of your internal team however, this could be a daunting task for the team to balance, especially depending on resource availability.
The Lowlights
Costs and Turnover
Creating an internal marketing team will come with a cost. Hiring a marketing team comes with salaries, benefits, and potential for turnover. The risk of having inconsistencies as team members leave and passing along the correct strategies to the new crew can leave your brand vulnerable and lacking growth.
The Final Decision
When deciding between going the in-house route or hiring an outside marketing agency it’s important to look at the full scope of your brand and it’s abilities within the current budget and team abilities.
In order to narrow down your choices, we recommend inquiring with agencies asking the following questions:
- What industries does your agency work within and have you worked with our brand’s specific industry?
- What does your reporting and analytics look like to help us achieve success?
- How do you determine pricing and the scopes of projects, and what can our team expect in terms of deliverables?
At Zozimus, our teams are equipped to work with a wide variety of industries including healthcare, pet products, hospitality, higher education, and more. We’d love to connect with you and have a free marketing consultation to see how we can help grow your brand today. Let’s connect!
BOSTON, MARS
