Agency vs In House

[pestmarketer]

Looking for some advice and input on this.

The question is, is it better to have a Digital Marketing Team in house or rely heavily on an agency for an SAB.

I work for a multi location, multi state SAB. We have a small team in house of link builders, gmb, and email marketing folk. We work with independent contractors for web dev, content, and paid search.

I'm kind of at a cross roads at the moment where I need to decide on investing more into hiring and building our in house team, or investing in an agency.

I know this is a very personal, individual company specific question that can't really be answered by anyone but the people involved. But it sure is a hard decision to contemplate, and that's why I'm here, for some input, thoughts, and perspective.

We do a couple of things really well; our GMB, our Link Building and Email.
I have no complaints about our web dev and paid search. But those are both done by contractors and could go either way (fold in house or work with agency)
We are really hurting on technical seo and content strategy/execution.

My considerations are:

• With an agency, you get a bigger pool of folks with experience and expertise, as opposed to just that single individual you hire. You get a team of experts instead of just one.
• Agencies work with multiple clients, multiple industries, and that can allow for some cross pollination of ideas that an in house would not have access to.
• With agency, you don't worry about hiring or employee management
• In house your team is focused 100% on your results, an agency has multiple clients, can't dedicate 100% of their time.
• In house can allow for synergies with other departments, like Sales or Operations

My decision really comes down to a shift of mindset, and reallocating budget from hiring a few missing pieces to putting that towards an agency.

I would keep our team of link builders, gmb, and email etc that are working well, as one could always use more hands on fighting map spam and hunting for good local link opportunities.

I'm heavily leaning on going this route for a year, and if it works out well great. And if not, we can always disengage and hire internally. That is far easier than hiring and letting people go.

Thanks for reading this and for your thoughts.

 

[keyserholiday]

There are pluses and minuses to both. If you bring somebody in-house, they may not stay current on trends and changes in the industry. Or they could be limited on what they know. I do a lot of consulting for in-house teams and while they do a great job, they don't know all of the nuisances. The same can be said of marketing agencies. It is going to come down to the skills of the people you hire. I know some brands that are crushing it because they have hired top-notch people and others that are dying because they hired the wrong people. The same can be said about SEO agencies, they typically hire people fresh out of college with little to no experience. I worked for a churn and burn agency and when I left, I had 126 monthly clients.

 

[pestmarketer]

There are pluses and minuses to both. If you bring somebody in-house, they may not stay current on trends and changes in the industry. Or they could be limited on what they know. I do a lot of consulting for in-house teams and while they do a great job, they don't know all of the nuisances. The same can be said of marketing agencies. It is going to come down to the skills of the people you hire. I know some brands that are crushing it because they have hired top-notch people and others that are dying because they hired the wrong people. The same can be said about SEO agencies, they typically hire people fresh out of college with little to no experience. I worked for a churn and burn agency and when I left, I had 126 monthly clients.

Thanks Keyser