Hiring In-House Marketers vs. Hiring an Agency: What's Best for your Business?
Introduction
As you grow, marketing will play a more important role in creating predictable and profitable pipeline for your business.
Now, you're facing a big decision: build an in-house marketing team or work with a specialised agency?
This choice will shape how your business grows and competes in the market.
In this article, you’ll learn the pros and cons of each approach and how they fit with your unique challenges. There’s no right or wrong answer, it’s about establishing which approach aligns best with your growth strategy.
Hiring an in-house marketing team
Building an in-house marketing team for your business can offer several advantages. With an internal team, you have direct control over your marketing efforts and can guarantee they align closely with your firm's vision and values.
Benefits of hiring an In-house marketing team:
Deep understanding of your firm: In-house marketers become experts in your specific services and client base.
Quick response times: Your team can react swiftly to market changes or new opportunities.
Brand consistency: Internal teams often maintain a more consistent brand voice across all materials.
Direct collaboration: Easy communication with other departments can lead to more integrated strategies.
Challenges of hiring an In-house marketing team:
Recruitment and retention: Finding and keeping top marketing talent can be difficult and expensive. The digital skills gap is real, and there’s a lot of competition and high salary demands when hiring a-players.
Limited perspective: In-house teams may lack exposure to broader industry trends and innovations. when your internal team is focused on the detail, it’s hard to take a broader perspective on the landscape.
Skill gaps: It's challenging for a small team to cover all necessary marketing specialties. Typically marketers specialise in one area, and a generalist will lack the necessary knowledge to be able to deliver the optimal results within each channel.
Technology costs: Investing in various marketing tools and platforms can be costly.
What skills do you need in an in-house marketing team?
Marketing Director / CMO
Salary £60,000 - £100,000
Your business will not be effective without someone to lead, strategise and orchestrate the marketing team. Your Marketing Director should have a strong track record in successfully leading marketing teams, with demonstrable success in previous businesses. Their experience should include both hands-on and strategic marketing. They’ll need knowledge of each channel to support their team, and a broader understanding of the market to support the business’s strategic positioning.
Content Marketer
Salary £35,000 - £45,000
Content is at the heart of all marketing. Your in-house Content Marketer should be adept at content strategy and be able to write content across different formats from longer-form guides to ad copy and social posts. Often it’s challenging to find someone who can do it all, larger teams may want to consider a direct response copywriter for ad copy, email copy and website copy. Then a more technical copywriter for longer form whitepapers and articles.
Paid Media Manager
Salary £40,000 - £50,000
The ability to reach new audiences and attract prospects relies on increasing awareness within your target audience and engaging them with enticing ads. Advertising is vital for you to achieve this. Your paid media manager should have experience and expertise across key advertising channels including Google, Linked and Meta. They should be analytical and able to interpret GA4 and in-platform data to make decisions.
SEO
Salary: £35,000 - £45,000
You’ll want to ensure you are visible to your target audience on search engines. An SEO is going to be pivotal in achieving this. They should have the technical knowledge to improve the performance of your website and fix technical issues. They should also have a good understanding of on-page optimisation and backlinking strategy. They will also be analytical and be able to understand and make decisions on data in Google Search Console and a variety of SEO tools.
Designer
Salary: £30,000 - £40,000
Producing marketing assets will require an experienced designer to ensure the visual aspects of your brand are cohesive across all your marketing channels. Similar to copywriting, your in-house designer will need to work across different formats. They should be able to design social posts and ad creative, alongside brochures and eBooks. You may even want them to support web projects and have experience of website design. You will find designers specialise in different areas of graphic design so make sure you pick the right person based on the specific assets your business is likely to need.
How much does an in-house marketing team cost?
To hire a multi-disciplinary marketing team you would need to invest between £200,000 - £280,000 per annum.
In addition to these costs, you will also need to think about advertising spend and investment in the necessary tools and technology.
Hiring a marketing agency
Partnering with an agency can provide your business with access to a broad range of expertise and resources. Agencies often bring a fresh perspective and industry-wide knowledge to your marketing efforts.
Benefits of working with an agency:
Diverse expertise: Access to specialists in various marketing disciplines, from SEO to content creation.
Industry insights: Agencies working with multiple clients often have a wider view of industry trends.
Scalability: Easily scale your marketing efforts up or down based on your needs.
Cost-effectiveness: Often more affordable than maintaining a full in-house team with the diverse skills necessary to run multi-channel campaigns.
The challenges of working with an agency:
Less direct control: You're not managing the marketing team day-to-day.
Potential lack of exclusivity: The agency may work with your competitors.
Learning curve: It takes time for an agency to fully understand your businesses unique aspects.
Communication hurdles: Coordinating with an external team can sometimes be more complex.
When considering an agency, look for one with experience in your sector. The right agency partnership can give your business high-quality marketing support and guidance—often at a lower cost than building an equivalent in-house team.
What different types of agencies are there?
Full-Service Agency
A full-service agency can deliver across all your key marketing channels. They will have a team of experts in each major discipline to ensure you can run multi-channel campaigns under one roof. This is often a more efficient option for businesses that have a lack of marketing expertise in-house. Typically the activity will be more cohesive and you’ll have one main point of contact who can bring in specialists from their team where required.
If you are looking for a full-service agency, consider one that specialises in your industry. A full-service agency that covers multiple industries will find it hard to keep up to date with your specific industry trends and be a strategic partner.
Specialist Agency
A specialist agency will typically specialise in one channel or marketing discipline. If you already have a marketing team and only want to fill one gap in your marketing mix, this may be the best route for you. Examples of specialised agencies include:
Creative Agency: Design and creative campaigns
Advertising Agency: Paid media across one or a mixture of channels.
SEO Agency: technical, on-page and off-page optimisation
Web Agency: Specialists in developing websites
A word of caution: If you are working with a specialist agency, and they claim to be able to manage other aspects of your marketing, be wary. Some examples of this are web agencies, that claim to do SEO or PR agencies that claim to offer marketing services. They will lack the expertise to support you with the latest best practices. Stick with the services they specialise in.
How much does it cost to hire an agency?
If you were to hire a full service agency to run the same level of activity as a fully equipped internal marketing team, you could be investing between £60,000 and £150,000 per annum. Whilst you would still need to invest in advertising spend, you would not need to invest in additional tools or technology.
Summary
Let's summarise how in-house marketing and agency partnerships stack up in key areas:
Ultimately, there is no right or wrong answer to this question. Both options have positives and negatives which need to be weighed up in the context of your existing business and your growth plans for the future.
If you are still struggling to decide, feel free to contact our team for a free strategy call to discuss the pro’s and con’s in more detail.
