Should you hire an in-house marketing manager or partner with a marketing agency?
To real question is…
What’s the best outcome for your business?
I’m sure you’ve asked yourself this question many times but you still need some clarity on what’s the best solution for your business.
Let me share with you some insights that will help you on this topic. But first, let me say this…
From the years of 2013 to 2016, I was the Australian Manager for an outsourcing consultancy based out of Philippines and Australia, and during this time many of our team members offshore were hired as marketing assistants to our client’s in-house Marketing Manager’s. Because I was regularly unpacking our clients’ marketing processes and systems, I was able to see the inside workings of all of their businesses (this amount totalled 316 in just 3 years to be exact), and it soon became clear to me there were significant limitations occurring in their businesses.
The problem was this…
Our clients Marketing Managers were wearing every hat in the marketing department – the strategist, designer, copywriter, website developer, email marketer, social media manager, campaign manager, reporting etc. While most companies had an offshore assistant to handle some of the more lower-value tasks, nonetheless, most of our clients still required other experts for specialised activities which meant more costs to our clients businesses.
With this in mind, let’s take a deeper look the key differences between hiring an in-house marketing manager versus partnering with a Marketing Agency.
Costs
In-house Marketing Manager
A qualified Marketing Manager will cost your business between $60-$75k per annum plus 10% Superannuation per annum, plus ongoing Work Cover premiums (these premiums rise in cost every year too). Additionally, hiring an executive level offshore assistant will cost your business approximately $15K part-time or $30K full-time + GST.
Marketing Agency
The benefit of partnering with a Marketing Agency is you can decide your budget and negotiate it with your agency (or us!) to reach your desired targets and business goals.
Example – allocate $50,000 per year + GST to roll out all of your digital marketing and social media marketing activities. Depending on your desired outcomes, this fixed price may also include all of your advertising and media spend as well.
Skills and Experience
In-house Marketing Manager
“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy is, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” — Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Founder
It’s absolutely true. Like any human being, a Marketing Manager may have a particular skill in one key area of the marketing department, but they are not likely to be skilled in all areas. Having a Marketing Manager who not only creates the strategy, then executes all of the marketing activities ends up providing poorly-run campaigns, less desirable campaign results, rushed content, and financial losses to the business overall. Additionally, a Marketing Manager quite often requires specialised support for Facebook Advertising, Video Marketing and Production, Google Adwords, Graphic Design, SEO, and CRM campaign set-up such as Infusionsoft or Ontraport.
Marketing Agency
Typically, a professional Marketing Agency will have a team of experts to handle every aspect of the marketing department. With the advent of globalised industry, Marketing Agencies now have access to individuals with a wide-range of experience and skills. At Web Traffic That Works, as you find, we are a little different. We don’t, and never will, hire employees to our business. Instead, we only work with industry experts that are contracted to utilise their specific areas of expertise. We now have a team of over 20 industry experts from across the globe who only execute their key area of skills and experience. This approach has provided our clients greater campaign results and ROI, more targeted leads, less business overheads, and better tax benefits to our client’s businesses.
Time and Efficiency
In-house Marketing Manager
Let’s face it, the majority of employees have a certain mind-set that is set for employment/security, not business or entrepreneurship. With this, most employees will work 9-5pm, Monday to Friday. When the clock hits 5pm they’re out the door. They also have a tendency to become complacent and lose focus on the tasks at hand. This ends up taking 3 times longer to complete tasks and projects, which creates further frustrations for clients and their business objectives and goals. Not only that, employees don’t understand the risks and pitfalls that business owners face, therefore they don’t take ownership in the same way a business owner does.
Marketing Agency
Contractors are self-employed small business owners. They have an entrepreneurial mind-set and approach to their daily tasks and missions. This mind-set helps them focus on quality control, personal management and task efficiency. They also have awareness of their figures and numbers, so they understand the challenges larger scale businesses face, therefore they take ownership of their outcomes and performance levels.
Technology, and Training and Business Development
In-house Marketing Manager
A Marketing Manager is a ‘project manager’ of marketing. They are ‘inside the business’ working on implementation, therefore their focus is heavily on ‘doing work’ not working ‘on the business’. This means they are not focused on creating new opportunities, or undergoing marketing training and development in new systems or technology for innovation or process automation. This also means they are not staying up-to-date with emerging strategies and industry related changes.
Marketing Agency
A good marketing agency will be at the forefront of new technology, systems and business growth strategies. Web Traffic That Works partner only with companies who understand the importance of business growth through innovation and technology. Our team of experts are experts because of their desire to learn new skills, technology, systems and strategies.
Support
In-house Marketing Manager
Here’s a question for you, what would happen if your Marketing Manager became sick or injured during a crucial phase of your marketing campaign or set up? Could you handle running the campaign yourself? Would your offshore assistant handle it? What about the additional costs of hiring a substitute campaign manager to handle the existing campaigns?
It’s safe to say it would not be the best outcome for your business, or your client’s business either. It certainly wouldn’t look ideal in your client’s eyes. Let’s hope this scenario would never happen, but the question always is – what would happen to you and your business if it did? You always need a plan-b strategy in place.
Marketing Agency
One of the greatest benefits of all when hiring a Marketing Agency (or us!) is that you have layers of management in place to handle ‘worst case’ scenarios. There’s no additional costs of recruiting experts, or risk of losing clients, or stress to you for lack of resources and time delays. A Marketing Agency will handle end-to-end management of your marketing, and they are accountable to you and your clients.
Reporting and Tracking
In-house Marketing Manager
One of the pitfalls a Marketing Manager faces is they are expected to have knowledge of the numbers and reporting across all areas of the Marketing department. This can be an overwhelming responsibility for any one person to handle, especially if you are a business that has multi-faceted strategies in place, such as Facebook & Instagram Ads, Google Adwords, and email marketing. Whilst you may have an assistant handling reporting tasks, it’s still too much for one person to handle. Furthermore, it’s likely the Marketing Manager would not have access to specialised reporting systems to aid their reporting and tracking. Which then begs the question – who are they accountable to if they can’t keep track of their results and numbers? It becomes a mess.
Marketing Agency
Industry Leading Marketing Agencies are not just proficient at developing strategies that produce results, they are Industry Leaders because they use innovative software to track their client’s marketing campaigns and social media objectives. You’ll find Web Traffic That Works are superior in this area because we have created custom-build software that enables us to track and manage results outcomes that is unrivalled in the industry.
Conclusion
After reviewing the information above, it’s safe to say hiring an in-house Marketing Assistant may not be the best solution for your business after all. So if you’re looking for solutions right now, consider partnering with an Agency instead.
Here’s the thing, I speak with hundreds of business owners every year about this topic, and I’ll tell you exactly what I tell them…
Partnering with a Marketing Agency means you have the ability to grow together in partnership. It’s simple, you pay them a fixed price, and they deliver on your business goals and objectives. Everybody wins. If they don’t deliver, they are accountable to you, and the buck stops with them. You have choices, and freedom. It’s that simple.
We produce web traffic that brings you consistent leads and opportunities for your business without the headaches of hiring staff. If you are looking for web traffic, you need Web Traffic That Works. Click here to get in touch.