Inhouse vs Agency: 6 Easy Rules to Help You Get it Right

As a marketer, you know you need to make a change, but where do you start? Do you create or expand your in-house marketing team or is it time to hire a digital marketing agency? Read on to weigh up the pros and cons of the age-old question of in-house vs agency and get ready to make your decision with confidence.

Like most things in marketing the answer is that it depends. To make it easier, we’ve developed six rules that will guide you through the key issues and decisions. If you’re struggling to execute your marketing plan with your current resources, read on!

This might seem obvious, but successful client-agency partnerships are built on absolute clarity on what success looks like. Two very similar businesses can have unique motivations for working with an agency.

Being clear from day one on your ‘why’ can help ensure everyone is working towards success. Here are some common reasons we see people working with Rocket:

1. Improve overall marketing results
2. Improve channel-specific results
3. Gain a true digital marketing partner to grow with over the long term
4. Efficiently scale up their existing marketing team
5. Gain a fresh perspective
6. Generate, or sanity-check, the overall marketing strategy
7. Deliver digital expertise above and beyond what they have internally
8. Reduce costs
9. Protect the time of their in-house marketing team
10. Fill a short-term gap
11. Train up the internal team before moving things in-house
12. Access sophisticated tools and data
13. Deliver on the specific expectations of key stakeholders
14. Ongoing education and training (especially in digital)
15. To quickly understand a new market 
16. And more…

Being unclear about your true motivations will almost certainly see you and the agency pulling in different directions. Let the digital agency know what’s important to you (above simply generating great results), understand how they believe they can help and enjoy the benefits.

Smart marketers and smart internal teams know that using a combination of in-house and agency resources can give you the benefits of both approaches and remove many of the drawbacks in the table above.

We see the real barriers to success firsthand at Rocket Agency, when a client has no in-house marketing resources and relies 100% on agencies working directly with founders or other non-marketing team members. They often struggle to get things done or communicate the valuable knowledge needed for the agency to do the best work. We also win a lot of new work from companies who have been trying to do it all in-house and struggle while doing so.

Successful, sustainable, and predictable marketing requires solid digital marketing objectives. Strategy is knowing what you intend to achieve and developing a clear plan for how to use your finite resources to get there.

Before you start reaching out to marketing agencies or researching how to find a digital marketing agency, you first need to develop a clear strategic plan. Be honest with yourself at this stage: Do you have the experience, skills, and time to develop an effective strategy in marketing in general or digital specifically?

If you’re short on genuine strategic skills, then teaming up with a digital strategy agency right now might be an excellent investment that will pay off big time.

You might be good at managing events, organic social posts, developing great content, and creating incredible email campaigns. However, there are probably also things you’re not so hot at. Typically, we find that digital marketing strategy, SEO, PPC, Social Media Ads, and creative are areas where many in-house teams struggle for best-of-breed results.

You need to cast a critical eye over what you do. It might be time to move some activities to external experts who live and breathe this stuff every day. Get it right and the results will make it worthwhile (and you’ll look really smart to everyone watching).

Marketing plans change, and new plans bring with them new focuses. You might need less of something you currently have. You also might need a lot more of something else. You might also now need something you have no idea about at all.

Going to external agencies to scale up or scale down on fixed internal resources makes a lot of sense. It’s pretty much always quicker and very often cheaper than making the same changes to a team of full-time in-house marketers.

We see a lot of excellent in-house teams ‘owning’ a selection of core marketing functions and then working with agencies like us for everything else. This also frees up your time to focus on those channels that you excel at more than others, ultimately driving better results across the board.

You might think this is a little self-serving, and you’d be right! But believe me when I say that the most counter-productive thing we see is when a client comes to us and dictates direction and execution. Rather than this being a sign that the client is a true expert, it tends to be a sign that the client is well and truly out of their depth.

If you’ve made the decision to spend good money on an agency, let them do what they do best. Work with them as an expert partner. There will be things that only you know about and your agency should care deeply about your knowledge in these areas. But there will also be things your agency will bring to the table if you’ve picked the right agency and you work with them in the right way.

If you’d like to hear from an in-house marketer on the pros and cons of in-house versus agency, James catches up with Racquel Collard, Marketing Manager of 4Cabling Australia.

For a low-down on how in-house marketers and agencies can work well together and get the best possible results, listen to this interview with industry veteran Jordan Slover on the Smarter Marketer Podcast. 

And to understand how to find an agency that fits your needs in the best way, this discussion with the CEO of Agency Management Institute, Drew McLellan, who has experienced life both on the agency and the client side can help.