When it comes to deciding whether to keep your marketing in-house or to outsource it’s essential to weigh up and fully understand the pros and cons.

Now, we’re painfully aware of how biased this could look, so to show you we’re not, we’ve put together a pros and cons list to give you some food for thought when considering outsourcing your marketing function to an agency like us. So together, let’s explore the benefits and challenges of both in-house and outsourced marketing to help you find the best path forward for your business.

In-House Marketing: A Closer Look

Keeping your marketing in-house means your team is deeply connected with your brand and business goals. However, this approach requires significant investment in hiring, training, and retaining talent. Additionally, it can be challenging to cover all the specialised skills needed within a single team, leading to higher operational costs. Despite these challenges, the control and consistency offered by in-house marketing can be highly advantageous.

Pros of In-House Marketing

Deep understanding of brand and culture: Your internal team lives and breathes your brand, fostering strong alignment with your goals.

Immediate access and communication: Real-time communication can facilitate quick decision-making and responsiveness.

Consistency and control: Having direct oversight ensures consistent messaging and branding across all channels.

Cons of In-House Marketing

Operational challenges: Managing a full team requires significant oversight, performance tracking, and administrative efforts.

Limited skill set: It can be difficult to maintain a team with all the latest specialised skills needed in today’s marketing landscape.

High costs: The financial burden of salaries, benefits, and ongoing training can be substantial and some businesses don’t have the budget and therefore the team to produce marketing as effectively as an agency.

In-house marketing offers deep brand understanding and control but comes with high costs and potential skill gaps. It’s an ideal choice if you can afford the investment and need tight integration with other parts of your business but it can limit your ability to bring in fresh perspectives and innovative strategies that an agency can provide.

Outsourced Marketing: A Wider View

On the flip side, outsourcing your marketing can bring specialised expertise and fresh strategies to your business. It allows access to a broad range of skills and can be more cost-effective. While it may result in less control over your brand’s voice and vision, many businesses build great relationships with their agencies and don’t find any compromise in communication or understanding of their brand due to these strong partnerships.

Pros of Outsourced Marketing

Access to expertise: Agencies bring specialised knowledge and keep up with industry trends and technologies.

Scalability and flexibility: You can adjust your marketing efforts according to your needs and budget, scaling up or down as necessary.

Cost efficiency: For the cost of one specialist on your team, you could get access to a whole team of specialists, providing a broader range of expertise for the same price.

Fresh perspective and new ideas: Agencies can challenge your regular way of thinking, offering fresh perspectives and innovative ideas that you might not have considered internally. This can lead to more creative and effective marketing strategies.

Cons of Outsourced Marketing

Potential for misalignment: Ensuring the agency fully understands and aligns with your brand and goals can be challenging.

Communication barriers: Distance and differing schedules can sometimes impede effective communication and quick responses.

Less control: Relying on an external team means giving up some control over daily activities and decisions.

On the whole, outsourced marketing can be a smart move offering access to specialised expertise, scalability, cost efficiency, and fresh perspectives. While it does come with challenges like potential misalignment with your brand goals, communication barriers, and less control over daily operations, many businesses build strong relationships with their agencies, mitigating these concerns.

We often work with a Marketing Director, CMO or Head of Marketing and act as their outsourced marketing team. This offers the best of both worlds, a marketing expert in-house, embedded in the organisation and its culture, and a flexible outsourced team who are able to ‘bring the outside in’ and deliver a proactive and energetic marketing resource for the brand. We find, by working together, the flexibility and innovation brought by outsourcing added to in-house expertise can drive significant growth.