This is a vital decision that you need to make when dealing with internet marketing. Here is a list of the defining points that come into the picture when choosing between the two.
Skill Diversity
Typically, internet marketing experts have different skillsets. You need to have someone to deal with paid searches, social media, content marketing, email marketing and many more.
The bottom line is that internet marketing is complicated and broad for a single person to be a master in all the various elements diligently.
That said, if you employ an expert in-house, you should expect them to offer you excellent services at one element, say paid search. But what if it is not yielding the expected results? What should you do?
Broaden Your Marketing
Businesses that employ in-house find it hard to diversify their marketing efforts. Investing in a new element of internet marketing is a risk. If you hire an expert who is well versed in one area and it does not work out, you will have made things difficult for yourself.
Due to this, such businesses have no option but to stick in that marketing element even if it does not work to the expected standards.
For instance, say you hire someone from a web design agency in Hampshire. One of their designers may come up with a beautiful landing page but post irrelevant advertisements that bring the wrong traffic to your site, it may be hard to get any meaningful results from your marketing efforts.
Should You Blame the Designer?
Absolutely not! But if you have limited marketing skills like this, you might not get the best results from digital marketing. Looking at the other side, you can get a wide array of skills if you contract an agency.
Account managers work for marketing teams that include experts that possess a wide array of online marketing skills. All these individual experts are good at their specialty, but collectively, they offer you better value than what a single employee would do.
And, as an advantage, since all the experts work with several accounts, they gain a lot of experience and expertise that make them better poised to deal with new marketing campaigns and challenges.
Invest in a Diverse Skillset
It is easy to mistake this as a costly way of going about things. After all, if you do not have the resources needed to hire an additional online marketing expert, can you pull off the means to pay an agency?
Usually, businesses do not require the dedicated efforts of a full-time expert in all the various online marketing areas. But they still need the services of each.
The disadvantage of hiring an in-house expert is that you will find it difficult coming across an expert who will be willing to work for a few hours every month.
With the agencies, things are different since an expert in a single area could manage various accounts. That would keep them engaged enough to warrant full-time employment with the agency even though the different accounts just require a few hours of their service weekly.
Due to this, working with an agency helps you to get the skills of top experts in different areas without having to employ them in-house.
Agency vs In-House
In that accord, should you pick an agency or an in-house expert when it comes to skill diversification?
The decision you make comes down to how much resources you have at your disposal. Bigger companies might lean towards hiring an in-house employee to diversify their marketing efforts.
All in all, if your marketing requirements are significant in that they justify hiring a full-time pro, it might be better to employ them and have them work for your company full time. However, this is not the best option for most businesses that seek diversification.
A huge percentage of businesses do not require or cannot afford a whole team of specialised experts and working with an agency seems to be the most realistic way of improving your internet marketing efforts without having to spend a fortune.