8 Benefits Of Hiring A Marketing Agency Over In-House

Updated October 3, 2018

Determining how to market your business online is a difficult decision – and one that can have big (not to mention, expensive) consequences affecting your bottom line. Deciding between hiring a team of in-house marketers or hiring a marketing agency does not just come down to price, but maximum efficiency.

Having worked with numerous clients over the years as the founder and CEO of my own marketing agency, Mod Girl Marketing, I’m familiar with the pros and cons of hiring a marketing agency over a team of in-house marketers. But don’t just take my word for it! I reached out to fellow marketers and business owners on LinkedIn to get their perspective as well. Check out what they had to say by clicking on the comments below:

8 Benefits of Hiring A Marketing Agency Over In-House Marketers

Here are 8 benefits of hiring a marketing agency – and reasons why an in-house team might be a better fit, depending on the needs and size of your company.

1. You don’t have to pay a marketer’s full-time salary.

Salaries for mid-career marketing professionals can be quite expensive, and they’re increasing every year. From 2016 to 2017, the average salary of a Director of Marketing increased by 17%, and the average salary of a Content Strategist increased by 40%.

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In fact, when you hire a full team of marketers instead of hiring a marketing agency, you can end up spending nearly $600,000 a year…plus, you can’t forget to tack on the cost of employee health care benefits, paid vacation days, lost productivity in sick days, and training costs!

Marketing Coordinator: $46,756

Marketing Associate: $49,708

Social Media Manager: $55,901

Content Strategist: $87,174

Marketing Manager: $78,429

Director of Marketing: $109,492

VP of Marketing: $163,134

2. You get a lot more than just marketing expertise for one fee.

An outside firm offers more than just marketing. When hiring a marketing agency, you get access to expert content writers, search engine optimization professionals, social media professionals, graphic designers, and web design professionals as well.

It can be risky to take a gamble on a new hire. Good help is extremely hard to find, and it can take a long time to find truly passionate, dependable, skilled people to work for your business.

If your company has the capacity to recruit, hire, and train strong employees for your in-house marketing team, then in-house marketers can be a good option. And since marketers nowadays often have a wide variety of skills, you can find employees that cover all of your marketing needs in a small team if you take the time to find the right people.

But when you outsource your marketing, you get to skip the hassle of interviewing individual marketers, and just spend time hiring 1 agency, who will do the hard work of hiring and training of their team members.

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3. You gain access to the latest technology and tools.

Having the right marketing tools on hand can increase efficiency, productivity, and performance. Sure, there are tools you can dig up for free if you know where to look. But hiring a marketing agency gives you access to premium-level services, software, and analytical data reports without charge.

Consider the cost of just a handful of the top marketing tools we use at Mod Girl:

Bright Local (local SEO) – $79.00/month

Hootsuite (social media) – $129/month

AWeber (email marketing) – $49/month

ReleaseWire (press release distribution, not including writing) – $89 PER release

As you can see, these tools can add up fast! Plus, with so many options on the market, you’ll likely have to train any new in-house employee to use the tools your company prefers.

With a large enough company, investing in these tools yourself makes sense. But if you don’t have hundreds of employees, you’re often better off hiring a marketing agency and leveraging the tools they have on hand, as well as their expertise in using them.

4. You maintain efficiency among your existing staff.

Some companies try to get around hiring in-house marketers, social media personnel, content writers, and SEO people by just having existing employees pick up the slack. But dumping the marketing burden onto existing employees increases the likelihood of burnout and reduces productivity in the long run.

In addition, your marketing efforts will lack consistency with so many people involved, especially since this haphazard approach often comes without a strategy.

Luckily, digital marketing agencies can help you develop that strategy to ensure you’re making the most of your marketing efforts. You can then either implement the strategy in-house, depending on the availability and skill of your current employees, or hire a digital agency to manage it for you.

5. You don’t need to train agencies.

When hiring a marketing agency, you won’t need to send employees to an extensive training program, pay for them to attend a seminar, or pay a senior marketer to groom a new employee in the art of digital marketing. Any reputable marketing agency will arrive qualified, experienced, knowledgeable, and ready to work for you.

Marketing agencies come with a track record of results. Plus, marketing agencies are used to taking on new clients. Although any new hire or agency will take time to get to know the specific needs and quirks of your business, an agency takes on new clients all the time, whereas an employee might only switch jobs every few years.

In addition, it’s possible to maintain a longer relationship with an agency. You can invest time and money in training an employee, but after a couple of years, they may decide it’s time for a change in their career. When hiring a marketing agency, you can keep working with them for years and years. Even if members of the team change, the agency will be responsible for getting new team members up to speed on your account – not you.

6. You can easily scale up your marketing efforts.

Under a traditional in-house operation, the only way you can increase the output of your marketing team is to hire more employees.

But marketing agencies already have an arsenal of workers on hand that can be called upon at a moment’s notice if you want to employ a bigger, bolder strategy.

Plus, agencies have the experience to help you scale faster. If you want to try Facebook Ads for the first time, for example, you don’t need to pay for one of your employees to take an online course or hire someone new. Your digital marketing agency should be able to adapt to your needs and help you with all of your marketing needs as you grow.

7. You keep up with the latest marketing trends, without a learning curve.

What in-house marketer has time to read up on all the latest social media, SEO, content marketing, and branding news? Usually they are so buried in day-to-day tasks, there is no room to grow, change, and evolve.

The majority of reputable digital marketing agencies take education very seriously. They should invest time into keeping abreast of the latest trends, tools, technologies, and strategies to serve you better, spending their own time learning how to use new resources, without charging you for their time.

8. You benefit from an outside perspective.

It’s easy to get tunnel-vision working from the inside. Employees may find it hard to express new ideas or bring up concerns, for fear of losing their jobs.

The saying “2 heads are better than one” is definitely true when it comes to marketing. A digital marketing agency is trained to look at your business from the consumer or client’s point of view, and brings years of knowing “what works” to the proverbial table.

The Bottom Line:

There is one huge reason why companies go through the expense and trouble of hiring an in-house marketing staff:

Keeping employees close to you means they know your brand inside-and-out, as no one from the outside can. They eat, sleep, breathe, and promote your corporate culture and work tirelessly for your company full-time. That level of knowledge and devotion is hard to match, no matter how good an outside firm may be.

Luckily, it doesn’t have to be an either-or choice. The ideal set up is to have at least one point person working internally who can collaborate with the outside marketing agency, getting the best of both worlds for the company.

Interested in seeing how hiring a marketing agency like Mod Girl Marketing can help your business increase leads and revenue today? Contact me here to find out!