Should You Build an In-House Marketing Team or Hire An Agency?

Every business eventually faces this dilemma – Should you hire a digital marketing agency or try do it all in-house?

This is not an easy question to answer. Of course budget plays a factor, but your decision should not be based solely on money.

The most important question is…

Do You & Your Team Have the Skills Required?

If the answer to this question is no, then trying to do it all in-house is going to be a long, expensive, and emotionally draining road to go down.

As I’m sure you know, learning a new skill and gaining enough experience to be effective doesn’t happen overnight and usually requires a lot of trial and error.

And trying to hire an expert in-house may not make financial sense.

But here’s the thing…

With digital marketing, we’re not talking about just 1 skill or one expert…

Digital marketing has grown and evolved over the years to now include many different disciplines like:

As you can see this is a long list and each one of the disciplines above can be segmented into even more specific required skills.

With this in mind, revisit the question, do you and your team have the skills required for digital marketing?

Most businesses will answer no. And for most businesses it will not make sense to hire and maintain an in-house team of experts in all the areas above.

This leads us to the answer to our original question…

Most Businesses Are Better Off Hiring an Agency

One of the key benefits of hiring an agency is that they have experts in each of the core digital marketing disciplines listed above.

For an agency to exist and stay competitive it must vet, hire, and train the most talented marketing experts.

That means you don’t have to, which means you’re freed up to focus your time, energy, and resources on building your own business rather than building an in-house marketing team.

There are many other reasons, but this is the most important and the one that many businesses overlook when making a potentially costly decision to do their marketing in-house.

Now, I know what you’re thinking…

Obviously I’m a bit biased on this topic since my company, FunnelGrowth, is a digital marketing agency. So if you want an unbiased take on this topic, then I urge you to read this recent, Forbes article.