Should You Hire an Agency to Grow Your Business?

When it comes to online marketing and growing your business, a lot can hinge on whether a business decides to work with an agency or keep things in-house.

In essence, you can reframe the question so that it looks like this: Should our business work hard on building our own team that can take care of our online marketing for years to come? Or should we save ourselves some time and effort by buying skills and talents from an agency?

No matter how you frame it, the answers need to stack up.

In this article, we take a look at whether or not your business should hire an agency to help it grow.

Skills

There’s no doubt about it: Agencies already have the skills you need. Your in-house team, on the other hand, is going to require some training before they level up. This will take time, cost you money, and it means they’ll be taken away from their current roles and tasks for a while.

Not just this, but you might find that training your staff is an ongoing process that doesn’t really stop. An agency, on the other hand, comes ready-made with years of experience to draw on.

When it comes to pure skills, agencies win.

Costs

The great thing about working with an agency is that you’re only paying for things that will move your business forward. You’re paying for their skills, talents, experience and their tools. This means you’re not paying for things like employee perks and vacation pay.

If you decide to go with an in-house marketing team, on the other hand, you have to pay the whole caboodle. You have to cover employee perks, vacation, bonuses, sick pay, and you also have to pay for the extra office space they’ll take up.

Not just this, but the better your in-house team gets at online marketing, the more you’ll have to increase their pay structure to accommodate their expertise.

Either way, working with an in-house team or going with an agency is going to cost you money. In fact, it has the potential to cost you a lot of your budget. For this reason, it’s well worth businesses exploring online marketing courses. They’re more cost effective than either an agency or an in-house team, and you’ll gain valuable skills that you can apply yourself.

Hiring Process

It’s a fairly easy task to hire an online marketing agency. Putting together an in-house marketing team, on the other hand, can take up a lot of your time.

From hiring a solid marketing director to finding an ace graphic designer and a social media god, you’re going to have to put in a lot of time and effort. Not just this, but the best of the best don’t have to work for you. They have lots of options, which means you’re going to have to be very good at selling your firm.

From recruiting to interviewing, putting together an in-house team can be more hassle than it’s worth. Then there’s the chance that you might hire the wrong people, which increases staff turnover.

Communication

Communicating with an agency can be difficult. You won’t be their only client and it’s not like they’re in the office with you. You might really, really, REALLY need a response right away, but they could be hundreds of miles away, working on another project. As such, response time can be long and it can set you back.

Conversely, an in-house marketing team is right there in your office. This makes communication super easy. Whether you need to brainstorm new ideas, develop a strategy or even shoot a new video, in-house teams can make life really simple on the communication front. More than anything, it makes supervising a project much easier for you and improves accountability.

Managing Workloads

In-house marketing teams are human beings who call in sick, take time off work to go on vacation—and even quit.

And they’re not always going to be the best at managing workloads, especially if you’re bringing in lots of new folk together who have never worked with each other before.

On the other side of the coin, experienced agencies are super organized and know exactly how to successfully manage their workloads. They’ve performed juggling acts with several clients in the past, and they can do so again. Sure, they’re human beings too. But if a team member is due a vacation, there’ll be someone ready to replace them.

Tools

In 2019, there’s a tool for everything.

And while most tools come with free trials or basic plans, it’s very likely that your business will need to make the most of the premium plans.

And premium plans cost money.

The best agencies already have access to the best tools. The good news is that you’ll get access to them for free. Yay.

On the flip side, if you went with an in-house marketing team, you’d need to pay for all the licenses and subscriptions yourself. And this is when costs really mount up.

Here is a list of the top marketing tools that your business may need in 2019.

Speed

Agencies can work pretty quickly. But what you have to remember is that you’re not their only client. And as mentioned, communication can be a real drag, which slows a project down.

In-house teams, on the other hand, are focused on your business only. As such, they work pretty fast.

If speed and productivity is a big issue for you, it might be worth going with an in-house team.

Conclusion

All in all, whether you go with an agency or build your own in-house marketing team really depends on your needs. As we’ve discussed, both have their own pros and cons. Take the time to consider what your priorities are and what would be best for your business. We hope you make the right choice!