In-Housing vs Agency Outsourcing: A Marketing Manager’s Guide

Marketing is a crucial element of any plan for business growth, but that’s only the first step. After deciding to make a marketing plan, you need to have a team to develop, fine-tune, implement, and oversee it – but who do you choose? You have two primary options, you can either go with an in-house marketing team to do it from within your business, or you can outsource. Which should you choose?

The Difference Between In-house And Outsourced

An in-house marketing team will be solely concentrated within your business. Either you will have an existing marketing department, or you may employ people specifically for the job. It’s possible to re-purpose existing employees too. Everything concerned with marketing will be handled on your premises by your own marketing team.

With outsourcing, the marketing will be handled by an external agency. The approach taken depends on the agency itself. Some may manage the whole process remotely, using a combination of virtual desktops, cloud sharing, and video calls to handle everything. Others may prefer to have a physical presence within your business when necessary.

When you work with Chain Reaction it’s all handled under our roof, from SEO to web development via social media marketing and all points in between – that means you don’t have to liaise with multiple agencies, you just work with one agency that can handle everything.

Why Is Outsourcing A Sensible Decision?

Outsourcing marketing is one of the most popular approaches to growing a business. Comparatively, few companies choose to keep the process entirely in-house. There are several critical reasons for this to consider.

1. You benefit from a wider experience pool

When you work with an outsourced agency, you’re benefitting from their considerable pool of talent and experience. A great marketing agency will have worked with a broad range of businesses and clients, from which they will have learned a lot of valuable marketing lessons. You will be able to benefit from that experience, meaning they’re able to fine-tune your marketing approach using the expertise they have gained working for other businesses and within different industries. An agency such as Chain Reaction also has a multi-disciplined team that can provide SEO, web analytics, content marketing, PPC, and a host of other services under one roof.

2. It’s actually much more affordable overall

Any in-house team you have is going to be expensive, and a marketing team is no different. When you outsource, you also outsource the bulk of the costs associated with managing and developing that team and the day-to-day operations. With outsourcing, you will have a straightforward monthly fee that makes it much easier for you to budget. Everything will be included in that fee, which means you don’t have to worry about hidden costs. When you manage an in-house team yourself, your costs are much more difficult to predict, and you will have to handle all the investment required for equipment and materials too.

3. Communication and data-sharing is easier than ever

Some years ago, the difficulty with outsourcing was communicating effectively. Marketing projects require constant communication and input from multiple sources, so organizing things could be difficult. However, things have changed now, and it’s easier than ever for remote teams to stay in touch and collaborate. Using the cloud, you can share documents instantaneously, and virtual collaboration programs mean teams can work together simultaneously, even when in different buildings. This means that you don’t need to have cutting edge technology in your business space to be able to work remotely with your outsourced marketing team.

Making A Key Business Decision

These are just some of the many benefits that outsourcing your marketing has over developing and managing a traditional in-house team. Your business stands to benefit significantly from the experience and insight an outsourced marketing agency has to offer.