Challenges of Moving Marketing In-House in 2023
In today’s fast-changing world of technology, businesses are focusing on digital transformation as a crucial goal. It means using technology to improve how they operate. As we move into the digital age, many companies are choosing to handle their marketing in-house.
Though having more control and accessibility might seem attractive, this shift comes with its own set of challenges. The process of moving in-house often involves significant and rapid changes, which makes managing these changes even tougher and more critical.
In order to tackle the obstacles that arise, it is crucial for organizations to recognize potential challenges. This awareness enables them to navigate the path to digital transformation more smoothly and successfully. While it won’t be an easy journey, at Cliffex, we assist you establish a foundation for long-term success in this digital age, through careful planning, effective change management, and a solid understanding of the challenges ahead.
This blog will walk you through the primary factors to evaluate when choosing between an in-house team and an online digital marketing company. It will address the challenges of undertaking transformation initiatives and explore the compelling reasons why you should outsource your marketing to an IT consulting company.
FURTHER READING
> 10 Reasons Your Business Needs Digital Marketing Agency
> What is a digital marketing agency and how can it help achieve your business goals?
Table of Contents
Factors to consider when weighing In-house against an Online Digital Marketing Company
Cost-Efficiency
When it comes to choosing between handling your marketing in-house or hiring an online digital marketing company, the cost is a crucial factor to consider. What matters the most is in terms of the expense difference between hiring a digital marketing team of 3-4 employees versus partnering with an agency. Upon research, you may find that agencies generally have a lower upfront cost, which could be appealing.
However, this decision should not be based on affordability only. Your company’s values and marketing budget play a significant role in determining the direction you should take. Various factors, discussed below, should influence your decision-making process.
Your Company’s Culture and Vision
While hiring a digital marketing team member from within your company might seem like an easier way to achieve this alignment. A full-time internal employee typically exhibits higher dedication and commitment as compared to an external agency. Nevertheless, outsourcing to a marketing agency can offer unique benefits, provided you collaborate with a cross-functional team consisting of high-performers. This alliance can help you create a vision for your digital transformation process that aligns with your business goals.
Wide Range of IT skill sets
To succeed in your transformation efforts, you may require a wide range of skills, including web development, social selling, pay-per-click management services, and local SEO. Assembling an in-house team with all these talents can be quite challenging because digital marketing demands varied skill sets that are often best executed by specialized individuals. On the other hand, an IT consulting company typically has several experts with various areas of expertise working on your marketing initiatives, covering a broader skill spectrum. And a single full-time employee rarely possesses the entire range of skills needed for all aspects of marketing efforts.
Driving Adoption of Industry Best Practices
In the ever-changing digital landscape, what worked yesterday may not yield the same results tomorrow. The competition is fierce, with new processes and technologies evolving rapidly. If you end up sticking to the same old methods it can cause your business to lag behind. Fortunately, marketing agencies excel in keeping up with the latest and most effective digital marketing practices. While experienced employees might be hesitant to embrace change, believing that their current methods suffice, agencies can introduce innovative approaches that are vital for staying ahead. What’s more, when organizations adopt new tools and technologies, proper training and skills are necessary for successful implementation.
Coping with the Continuous Evolution of Consumer Needs
Imagine this scenario: Everything is going smoothly until one day, your competitor launches an easy-to-use website, leaving you struggling to meet your customer’s needs. This is the time when you realize that your website urgently requires a major update. So what road would you take- should you handle this in-house or seek external help?
If you try to do this in-house, it could take a lot of time and effort. You would need to post a job, review resumes, interview candidates, and check references. This process might be slow and could potentially disrupt your marketing strategies.
To be proactive and agile, you need a digital marketing consulting company that will act quickly and efficiently. At Cliffex, we jump right in, conduct a competitor analysis and develop an effective strategy without any delay. What’s more, we are well-prepared to handle the situation and make immediate changes, ensuring that your business remains competitive in the face of challenges.
So, whether you should choose an agency or an in-house team depends on how urgently you need to ramp up your marketing efforts.
Challenges of Hiring an In-house Marketing Team
Opting for an in-house marketing team entails the formation of a dedicated group of marketers who will work full-time within your organization. Their responsibilities encompass a wide range of marketing activities like SEO, Content Marketing, PPC Ads, Social media marketing, and much more. Undoubtedly, this requires hiring experts with relevant experience to fulfill your end goals.
However, building an in-house marketing team is far from a swift process. It demands the need for various resources and skill sets, making it time-consuming, costly, and demanding in terms of both effort and resources. Thorough planning, perfection, and implementation are vital to ensure the team’s success.
Continue reading to find out the reason why most organizations are forced to stop and rethink their decisions:
Significant Budgetary Expansion
Let’s get straight to the point- managing your marketing in-house can be a costly endeavor. From covering employee expenses to investing in marketing technology, everything requires a significant financial commitment.
Each individual you bring on board for your marketing team will require a salary. Apart from providing the base salary, employers must cover additional costs, such as taxes, insurance, benefits, equipment, tools subscriptions, and what not. Depending on the type of business you run, you will need at least three people on your team to tackle your digital marketing aspect. Here is a look at the average salary for each position:
- Digital marketing manager: $80,607
- SEO Specialist: $56,085
- Social media marketer: $48,664
- Content Writer: $54,343
- Graphic designer: $67,603
In total, building and sustaining an in-house marketing team can amount to an average of $300,000 per year. This is just an estimate, the figure can fluctuate based on the number of individuals you hire, experience, and also the technology investments you make.
Lack of Requisite Knowledge and Skills
If you aim to find one person to handle all marketing tasks, you may encounter a lack of expertise in specific areas. For instance, they might possess basic knowledge of designing attractive images and creating compelling headlines but lack in-depth expertise in these domains, since their time is divided among various responsibilities.
Assembling a well-rounded team necessitates finding experts in diverse fields, such as graphic design, content creation, search engine optimization, social media management, and PPC advertising among others. However, finding all the required expertise in a single individual can be challenging and rare.
Furthermore, the marketing landscape undergoes continuous evolution, marked by the regular emergence of new technologies and trends. Ensuring that your team stays abreast of the latest industry practices can be a challenge. An in-house team may struggle to scale quickly and effortlessly. Additionally, expanding your marketing efforts would entail going through the time-consuming hiring process again to onboard new team members. Providing opportunities for ongoing training and skill development is also crucial.
Difficulty in Keeping Up with Trends
The marketing industry is constantly evolving, as big platforms introduce updates, or consumer preferences emerge regularly. Staying informed about the latest trends and best practices is crucial for developing effective marketing campaigns and maintaining a competitive edge.
Take social media platforms for example. The algorithms play a crucial role in determining the visibility of your brand’s content. One moment your posts are reaching a wide audience and the engagement is high. However, with a minor tweak in the algorithm, your content reach may drastically decrease, and engagement may suffer.
Given the considerable time and resources required to stay abreast of industry trends, in-house teams may find it challenging to keep up. Their focus is often divided among various responsibilities, making it difficult to dedicate sufficient attention to the fast-paced marketing environment.
Additionally, the learning curve for new trends and emerging technologies can be steep and in-house teams may struggle to keep pace with the quick adoption of these innovations, potentially putting them at a disadvantage compared to more agile external marketing partners who specialize in staying up-to-date with the latest marketing advancements.
What can Online Marketing Agencies do that in-house teams can’t?
If you already have experience working with both an in-house team and outsourcing certain marketing aspects to an IT consulting company, you likely have some insight into the answer to this question. Seeking assistance from experts in the field can be an effective approach to streamlining the digital transformation process and addressing the challenges that arise.
Compared to in-house marketing, partnering with Cliffex offers several advantages. It streamlines strategy implementation, simplifies the adoption of technology, and drives productivity and cost efficiency. With our personalized guidance, every step of the way, you can be confident in achieving your digital marketing goals and thriving in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
Check out how working with a digital marketing consulting company can benefit you:
The Big One: Cost Effectiveness
Hiring a marketing agency can lead to substantial cost savings in the long run. When you opt for an agency, you are only paying for the services and eliminating the need to pay payroll taxes, purchase essential campaign tools, and provide employee benefits. While agencies or consulting companies might require a significant upfront payment against the package you select, you also end up avoiding additional costs.
Masters in Digital Marketing Domain
Digital marketing agencies come in various forms, ranging from full-service companies like Cliffex, equipped with a team of experts proficient in all aspects of digital marketing, to specialized marketing agencies that have only specific areas of expertise, like SEO or SMO. One of the key advantages of partnering with these reputable agencies is the years of experience and extensive knowledge they bring to the table. They know the ideal approach that would work for your campaign.
For instance, if you initially consider social media marketing, you might be inclined to focus on platforms like Twitter or Facebook. However, dedicated social media experts from the agency may recommend and understand how to derive value from trending sites like Instagram and Pinterest, tailoring their recommendations to suit your industry, products, or services.
Scalability? Not a Problem Anymore
In an in-house setup, as your marketing campaign expands, your budget increases, or you intend to introduce new products or services, you’ll inevitably face the need to expand your team size. This expansion requires additional resources to support and fuel the growth of your business.
However, when you work with an Online digital marketing company, the situation is different. A dependable agency can easily adapt to your business’s growth and changing needs. They provide a variety of plans and packages specifically tailored to suit the size and requirements of your business. This flexibility ensures that your marketing efforts can scale seamlessly without the need for substantial resource investment on your part.
Offers Clear Insight on The Progress
Avoiding investments that yield no results is crucial for any business. To achieve this businesses require detailed reporting to measure and analyze their marketing efforts effectively. However, with a multitude of marketing methods being adopted, it can become difficult to know the real return on investment.
Digital marketing agencies possess the ability to track performance using various tools and analytics, including website traffic, conversion rates, and other essential metrics. They can identify which marketing channels are performing well, and which ones need improvement. When you partner with Cliffex, you gain the added benefit of receiving regular updates on your campaigns, whether on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. Additionally, a website audit is provided to help you make informed decisions based on the data, ensuring that your investments are optimized for success.
BONUS: We have the tools in place to make the most of your digital marketing campaign!
To Sum Up
When faced with the decision of choosing between investing in an agency or hiring a team, you must consider several crucial factors. Ultimately, what matters is having trust in the people you hire and feeling confident in their ability to deliver based on their experience are paramount.
From our viewpoint, opting for the route of an online digital marketing company is the ideal solution to say goodbye to the challenges. By collaborating with Cliffex, an industry-leading agency, businesses, both large and small, have successfully grown their online presence through strategies tailored and optimized for their specific target audience. With our expertise and track record, you can bid farewell to uncertainties and confidently navigate the path to digital marketing success.
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