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Are you considering hiring a marketing agency for all of your marketing needs? You’ve come to the right place! Today, we are discussing which factors you should take into consideration when deciding between an in-house marketing team and a marketing agency.
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- Your Marketing Budget
- Your Monthly Marketing Items
- Expectations and Involvement
1. Your Marketing Budget
First things first – what is your marketing budget?
If you are planning on spending $50,000 – $100,000 per year on your marketing, you want to make sure you diversify your marketing efforts as much as you can, to connect with your target audience at every touch point – from consideration to purchase.
In 2018 you want to diversify your marketing as much as you can.
With marketing being so transparent and measurable these days, you want to make sure you put your money where you expect the most visibility for your brand and your services. If this is the first time you decided to invest in a (consistent and organized) marketing plan, with no previous data or benchmarketing available, you will want to allow some time for testing different mediums, to make sure you find the right one for your business, before you commit to a specific solution. Which leads us to point #2 below.
2. Your Monthly Marketing Items
This one piggy-backs on the first point – if you are planning on being involved in trade shows, digital marketing, content creation, graphic design, branding, and more – keep in mind that you will need to find experts in each of those areas to fill your marketing team. You will need to hire at least 2-3 in-house marketing experts to handle your website, your ads and your social media. On the other hand, if you have a business manager who can deal with a marketing agency instead, you will cut down on your internal expenses (at least) in half, by hiring a marketing agency to fulfill the necessary (various) marketing roles.
3. Expectations and Involvement
How much time do you have to manage your internal marketing team (if this is the direction you think you should go)? Do you have an HR department? What are your business goals as a company? Are you looking to grow your team? Managing a marketing department would add extra time on creating internal policies and procedures, more internal meetings, etc.
Do you want to be in the business of marketing, or in the business of your own business?
Some of our clients say that they don’t want to be experts in marketing, they just want to do their work. So, depending on the nature of your business, and how “close” you to marketing already – you want to estimate the amount of time you will have to invest in growing your own marketing department.
Say if you are in a business that implies content creation then, perhaps, you already have the baseline resources that could be re-purposed to market your business. But if you, for example, run a manufacturing business, that focuses on product development, and your sales process is direct to consumer with a long cycle – then, marketing and PR, might not be something that you have on your mind on a daily basis.
Think if you want to start embedding marketing as a regular item into your daily huddles and management meetings or if you would rather prefer to just have someone reporting on the top level marketing achievements, reported to you, based on your business’s goals.
Did this article resonate with you? Get in touch! We are happy to chat more about this and give you a free assessment if hiring an in-house marketing team would work better for you than hiring a marketing agency. Contact our marketing agency in Vancouver to set up a meeting – we always have chocolate (and coffee).