Online marketing can be challenging at times. Although most people will want to keep things in-house, some choose to hire a marketing agency to help. Each of these choices has its pros and cons: one of the reasons careful consideration is needed before making the final decision. Outlined below are some of the different things you need to know about hiring an agency and doing your online marketing in-house.
1. Skill Diversification
Online marketing is vast. Finding someone that can handle everything is next to impossible. This is why online marketers come in different packages ranging from social media masters, paid search specialists, and content marketing pros, to conversion rate rulers. That said, if you hire a specialist in one of these fields for in-house marketing, say paid search, it then means he/she can handle just that. This means you might have to hire another expert if you need content marketing or social media marketing to kick off. A marketing agency might be the only answer to your woes.
2. Diversify Marketing
Having an in-house marketing specialist makes diversifying your online marketing efforts harder than they should be. That said, hiring someone for general in-house marketing, and especially if they aren’t experienced in the niche, can bring more problems to your business. You also don’t want to stick to one marketing channel.
A good example is hiring an excellent landing page designer. While the designer may be capable of doing an excellent job in this, they won’t be as good with advertisements. If he/she tries running ads for the company, then chances are you won’t get good traffic, or even worse, have the wrong traffic directed your way.
Getting the wrong traffic to the site isn’t your designer’s fault. Working with a marketing agency, however, helps take care of such issues. These agencies have a wide range of skill, expertise, and experience in online marketing. An agency will have a team of experts in almost every online marketing speciality; this includes Facebook, AdWords, design, testing, ads, and so on. While each team is good at their speciality, their collective expertise provides better value and performance as compared to a single person. In addition to this, each team member has in-depth experience in the field.
3. Diverse Skill Set
Having a team of expert marketers in various fields for in-house marketing can be a rather expensive investment. Since most companies cannot afford this, going for a marketing agency makes it a lot cheaper and affordable. You don’t need the dedicated service of a social media expert, or an AdWords expert, all through the life of your company. Some of these will only be required when the need arises. Marketing agencies, however, have a team of such experts managing several accounts. One AdSense expert will manage multiple accounts, meaning he/she will be busy throughout. The fact that he/she is managing several accounts means his/her expertise becomes better with time. For this reason, hiring a marketing agency puts a team of highly competent and skilled experts at your disposal at a fraction of the cost.
4. In-House Vs Agency
If skill diversification is what you need, you might then want to consider both options: agency and in-house. For larger companies, hiring an in-house team would be the preferred option. Smaller companies can also hire a dedicated expert for a specific marketing channel. This means he/she will work full time to help drive the desired results.
Agencies, however, make it possible to access a wide range of expertise in whatever marketing field you wish to explore. Whether you can afford a team of dedicated marketers or not, an agency, such as a marketing agency in Basingstoke, could be the best investment for the company. One of the reasons for this is because agencies have teams of experts working on a specific marketing niche, which again raises the bar much higher. This means you get better service and value for your money as well. Having a marketing agency also means you won’t have to spend more than you can afford on the service.