Working With a Digital Agency Vs. Hiring In House

If you are looking to scale up your digital efforts, you will need talented people that can take charge of and execute your strategy.

But should you build your own in-house team or hire an agency partner?

There are compelling reasons for both, and it mostly depends on your situation.

Read on to find out which decision is better for you.

The Benefits of Working With a Digital Marketing Agency

Digital agencies are companies that help other businesses perform a specific function such as marketing, development, or design.

They act as a substitute for an in-house team, serving the same labor function but outside of the organization.

They typically specialize in certain areas, depending on how big their team is and what expertise they have.

Other ways to think about digital agencies are as an outsourced team or in some cases a group of freelancers working together.

Here are the benefits of working with a digital marketing agency:

Deeper Expertise

Digital marketing agencies are more likely to have deeper expertise when it comes to a specific role or industry. This is because they most likely specialize in a certain area or have worked with clients in your space before.

Specialty – Most agencies specialize in one or two things, such as content marketing or performance advertising. Combined with the fact that they provide these services to multiple clients, it is likely that any given agency has a high level of competence and expertise in their domain.
Industry insights – Agencies can work with dozens of clients at a time. Chances are, they’ve worked with a company in a similar situation or industry as your own.

Diverse Skills

When you hire an agency, you are not just hiring one person. You are hiring a whole team and their network, which can sometimes be ten or more people.

Although you may be hiring an agency to help you with SEO, you may find that they have team members that can help advise on producing content or even designers that can help improve your user experience.

This provides benefits such as:

More perspective – A diverse team can help solve problems faster. Diversity allows teams to see things from different perspectives and come up with creative solutions.
Flexibility – It may be the case that you need to expand into a different marketing channel or adapt your strategy based on a changing environment. Agencies give you more flexibility with your strategy, so if social media isn’t working you can easily change to something else.

Scalable

Scaling a business isn’t easy. Two of the key challenges that come with scaling are getting the right talent and getting enough new customers.

Using the right digital marketing agency can help alleviate these two key scaling challenges.

On the talent side, you won’t need to think about having to find and hire senior marketing people. You won’t have to build out a management structure for that department either.

When scaling your growth, it’s simply a case of double downing on what’s already working with your agency and fully exhausting that marketing channel. If at some point that marketing channel stops working, you can simply leverage your agency’s diversity to test out new channels.

Transparent vetting

When hiring in house, it can be hard to accurately vet the quality of the hire. For a start, it can be hard to validate the accuracy of the claims on their resume.

References can be useful, but employers typically stay on the safe side and give a positive reference to avoid any potential legal trouble.

Agencies have it a bit different, however, and clients are very transparent and vocal if an agency has underperformed.

You can easily find and read client reviews about a particular agency on websites such as Trustpilot before deciding to work with an agency.

Dedicated Partner

The dynamic between working with an agency and hiring an employee is very different.

An employee understands that they are part of a chain of command. This means that it is unlikely they will be thinking on a strategic level unless they are part of senior management.

A digital marketing agency is different in that they work with you as a partner. So in many ways, you aren’t paying for an extra team of employees, but more so a marketing partner or even co-founder.

This enables the following benefits:

Results-driven – Your agency partner knows that if they don’t deliver results, you won’t have a working relationship for much longer. This means that the incentives are properly aligned and there is an urgency to make things happen.
Strategic insight – Your digital marketing agency will come in with an outside perspective. This will help you see problems that you didn’t know even existed. They will also be thinking on a much higher level about how to really grow your business.

The True Cost of Hiring In House

People often have the misconception that hiring an agency is more expensive than hiring in house.

It naturally depends on the agency you hire and the scope of work, but there are a lot of hidden costs when hiring in house that many people don’t consider.

When accounting for hiring the best talent, the cost of building an in house team quickly adds up.

Recruitment cost – First, you have to set aside a budget to actually finding the right person. This includes costs such as ads, networking events, recruitment personnel and so on. There is also the cost associated with not having a role filled, which could take months.
Training and onboarding – Each new employee also has a ramp up time before they reach full productivity. At the beginning, each new hire represents a cost which needs to be taken into consideration.
New software – Consider also the costs of tools that your team may need to do their job such as analytics, communication and HR tools.
Salaries – The biggest cost of employees comes in the form of their salaries. The better the talent the higher the cost.
Retention – A bad hire can really set you back. In the worst case, they may do damage to your brand and stall your marketing operations. But even if it’s simply not a good fit, you already spent a lot of money acquiring them and you are losing money by not having the role filled.
Legal – Employees come with legal consequences. If somebody is proving to be a bad fit after the probation period, it may be difficult to release them.

Conclusion

Whether you go in house or build out your own team will come down to your unique situation.

You will have to consider all the variables such as cost, your market and even your ability to build a great team.

Keep in mind also that it may not have to be a binary decision.

The best route forward may be a combination of some in house hires supplemented with a digital marketing agency.

References

https://neilpatel.com/blog/in-house-team-vs-digital-agency
https://digitalneighbor.com/10-reasons-hire-digital-marketing-agency
https://www.dmcgglobal.com/blog/2022/05/is-the-grass-always-greener-things-to-consider-before-moving-from-agency-to-in-house
https://www.webfx.com/digital-marketing/learn/in-house-marketing-vs-agency/
https://www.emrrecruitment.co.uk/articles/2021-1/agency-vs-in-house-which-is-best-for-your-digital-marketing-strategy-93322810354

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