In House Agency vs. Outside Agency…
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We are currently doing PPC inhouse. Our SEO however, is out of house. Here is something that I’ve been mulling over. What is more valuable - doing as much of the advertising and marketing in-house, or to hire an agency?
Advantages of doing in-house:
1) Accountability - Anything get’s screwed up you bring in your employees in and just give it to them over the head!
2)Â Increased ROI- Agencies fees are generally pretty expensive. They charge you through the nose. You know you are spending alot more. Contrast that with hiring an employee, many times it’s much cheaper to hire an employee.
3) Specialization in your industry- The people who you hire will probably know your industry better than any outside agency. However, if you keep an agency for a while, they can learn the ropes pretty well too.
Advantages of doing out of house:
1) More professional: The agencies are generally required to give more stats to their clients. So while your employees will be more “accountable”, the agencies will have to show the bottom line numbers. This will probably increase your focus.
2) Better knowledge of the specific Industry: Many times hiring a CMO who is really experienced is out of range even of mid-size companies. Instead, the company picks an experienced insider at the company. They are generally saddled with many other responsibilities as well. This leaves the CMO with less knowledge of each specific marketing industry. Particularly with the fields that are moving at dizzying paces - like online marketing, social media marketing etc. The CMO understands the fields from their perspective - and in context to what they have done. However, the agency specializes in the industry, and probably knows more hands on of what is going on in the industry.
In sum, it really depends on your companies vision.
So what’s my vision of a company? I think that the only alternative to having an outside agency is to have a specialist in each field. That means PPC, SEO, Direct Mail, Radio and TV and all other methods of marketing your companies employ. Often, this is much more expensive than hiring an outside firm, and is not worth it. In addition, certain agencies are finally seeing the light, and charging “pay per performance”!
In short, my vision of a company is having a CMO who is from inside the company, and a couple of people below him managing all the agencies in all of the niche areas. However, this really depends on the field. Sometimes, especially if you decide to spend a large marketing budget on it, it’s more worth it to bring specialists into the company instead of going outside.
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