By Should you outsource your digital marketing to an agency or hire digital marketing experts as employees?
A perplexing decision several business owners often face is the decision between hiring in-house employees or working with a digital marketing agency. Regardless of whether your company is big or small, this decision can be a difficult one to make. When you’re running a business, time is a precious commodity, and marketing your brand, being a continuous effort, can end up consuming a significant portion of your working hours.
A liberal expenditure of time and resources is required to ensure that your business effectively reaches the right audience at the right time. Let’s look at the pros and cons of both our options so that you can make an informed decision.
Benefits of Outsourcing your Digital Marketing to a Marketing Agency
1. Save on Costs and Time.
An in-house team can be a lot more expensive. You’ll have to pay for things like rent for office space, hardware like laptops and desktops, proprietary software licenses, taxes, and more that will bring down your profits. Hiring an in-house team of digital marketing experts can also be very expensive. The process of finding quality talent can be difficult and time-consuming as well.
Building an in-house team with all this talent is not going to be feasible. In contrast, outsourcing your marketing to a digital marketing agency is going to be far less expensive. They will provide all the human resources in one place and at a far lower rate than what you would have to pay to individual employees with specialised skillsets.
Also, with an agency, you don’t have to spend your time searching for and interviewing potential employees as they will take care of all the work for you. You can thus spend more time focusing on your business and not worrying about things like hiring new employees, staff calling in sick, workplace politics, and the hassle of providing insurance and other employee benefits since all these things will be managed by an external agency. At the same time, you can rest assured that a dedicated team of specialists will be working hard on your project to deliver results that meet your expectations.
2. Insights into the latest trends and access to the latest technology
One of the things that make effective digital marketing tough is the need to stay competitive and to be engaged with your customers. This requires keeping up with the latest trends and insights. However, of late there are innumerable solutions and marketing platforms available.
It can be difficult to know what works best for you out of all the new and emerging technologies. A good marketing agency will be knowledgeable in a wide variety of software solutions and will make sure to use the strategies and systems that work best for your needs.
3. Increased Flexibility that lets you do more with less
When in-house employees are responsible for digital marketing, it will be tough to use all the digital channels available to grow and sustain your business. It’s practically impossible to create all the content like social media campaigns, email lists, etc. that you need for marketing with in-house employees since these things require specialised skills and you can’t hire everyone. On the other hand, outsourcing your digital marketing will allow you to use multiple marketing channels with ease because the agency will have an existing roster of specialised workers from which they enlist workers where required.
For example, an agency will deploy a graphic designer to manage your website interface, a copywriter to take care of your blog or email newsletter, and a social media expert to automate your platforms. A capable digital marketing agency has the ability to offer a wide range of solutions to help you with your business. Regardless of whether you’re looking for help with a one-time website redesign, or ongoing marketing services, outsourcing your marketing to a digital marketing agency offers flexibility for both short-term and long-term projects.
Benefits of Hiring In-House Digital Marketing Experts
1. Effective Communication
Effective communication is essential for success in any venture. With an in-house marketing team, you’re bound to be able to communicate your preferences and receive timely updates in a regular manner seeing as you will be interacting with them regularly. Meetings can be scheduled as and when required. For a third-party marketing agency, this might not be the case. Since most of the time, a third-party agency will be dealing with multiple clients at once, they may not always be immediately accessible and you may notice a lack of day-to-day communication.
Outsourced work usually means more phone/email communication and fewer in-person meetings. However, this often depends on the third-party company. Any dependable marketing agency will hold weekly or monthly meetings to discuss results, projections, quarterly plans, etc, and a good marketing agency will make sure to provide you with daily updates. However, generally, the communication may not be as great as with in-house employees.
2. Better control over the expenditure of time and resources
When you’re a stakeholder in a project, you’ll want to make sure everything goes as planned and that time and resources don’t go to waste. Seeing as in-house employees are directly under your supervision, you’ll be able to influence the projected growth in a more direct manner and make sure that things are happening the way that you want them to. Given their responsibilities to multiple other companies simultaneously, a third-party agency is unlikely to be as closely invested in a company’s success and growth.
