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Why would you outsource marketing to an agency that isn’t a part of your company when you can run it all internally? A common answer is ‘we’re paying for expertise that we don’t have’ – which is a good answer. Outsourcing your marketing is great to get you started but even for our own clients we tell them to plan for eventually taking marketing in-house. Taking your digital marketing in-house has many benefits and in this article, we’ll be exploring exactly how you can do this.
In particular, we’ll be covering:
What Does Taking Your Digital Marketing In House Mean?
When it comes to digital marketing, you can pay agencies to do the work for you (marketing done for you), or you can train your team and do the work yourself (marketing done by you).
Marketing done for you is where an external team, usually a marketing agency, handles all of your team’s digital marketing activities, including strategy, paid media, social media marketing, email marketing, lead generation and more.
On the other hand, marketing done by you is where an external team trains your internal team with the objective to eventually make you self-sufficient. This is known as taking your digital marketing in-house, and it means that once your company has the knowledge, systems and processes in place, your team should never need an external agency to aid with marketing again.
At RedPandas, we offer both Done For You and Done By You Services. When it comes to Done By You services, we follow the ‘They Ask, You Answer’ framework for training and coaching our clients. At the core of They Ask, You Answer (TAYA) is a really simple idea: educated prospects like you because they TRUST you and as such you’re more likely to win the moment-of-truth click or call.
Why Would You Want to Take Your Digital Marketing In House?
Taking your marketing in house has a positive impact on your company and avoids some of the negatives that come with hiring an external agency. Let’s take a look at these.
The Positive Impact of Taking Your Marketing in House
There are seven positive points of impact when you take your marketing in house:
- Significantly more leads and sales
- Greater quality control
- Significantly faster execution
- Employees are happier, more skilled and feel more valued
- Saves money in the long run
- Finite/limited time period for payments
- Increases the value of the company
Significantly more leads and sales
When you take your marketing in-house, you have the benefit of combining marketing and sales teams When this happens, your marketing team are able to produce pieces of content that answer customer questions that are presented to salespeople every single day. These pieces of content can then be used by salespeople in the sales process. For example, salespeople can ask prospects to read a relevant article that answers some of their questions before they hop on a call with the prospect.
This results in two different things happening. First, leads will significantly increase over time as your website begins to generate more traffic for questions that customers are searching for every day. Second, close rates will dramatically increase and the length of sales cycle will shorten, resulting in more sales.
Ultimately, when you take your marketing in-house, marketing and sales have the opportunity to work together to generate more traffic, more leads and more sales.
Greater quality control
Since everyone is in-house, the insourced approach leads to a greater level of control over the quality of the work being produced. On top of this, who better to share the company’s brand message than those working in that same company every single day?
Significantly faster execution
Since everything is managed in house, there are less time lags due to fewer communication channels that need to be accessed every time a marketing activity is ready for review from a manager. Faster turnaround times on work leads to more work overall being completed, and more value for your buck.
Employees are happier, more skilled and feel more valued
An incredible by-product of our done by you service that we initially underestimated is TAYA training and coaching is the most powerful training and development program leadership and marketing could undertake.
Great marketers especially want to develop their skills and knowledge. Part of the value for a marketer working somewhere is how much they feel they are growing, learning and adding value for the organisation they work for. When working with an agency that externally manages your marketing your internal team simply doesn’t get this value. In fact, sometimes, there is often conflict between internal marketers and the agency you employ. TAYA avoids this and builds better marketer and salespeople.
Saves money in the long run
While there is a cost in the initial stages to get your team up and running with marketing done by you, this quickly transforms into an investment once your company owns the systems and processes around marketing. When these systems and processes are owned, it allows your team to make a significant impact on your company without ever having to outsource. This results in increased growth and saved costs.
Additionally, companies that invest in TAYA see their inbound leads and conversion rates grow significantly. This often results in less reliance on paid media spend and paying per lead to external aggregators – who of course offer zero loyalty to your business.
Increases the value of the company
When marketing systems and processes sit inside of the business instead of in an external agency, it acts as an asset as this can be utilised in the future regardless of management changes in the company, thereby increasing the value of the company.
Avoiding The Negatives That Come with Hiring an External Agency
When you outsource your digital marketing, there are a bunch of negatives that you could avoid IF you took your marketing in house.
These include:
- Speaking in your brand’s authentic voice is a challenge
- Speed of execution is slower
- You’re competing with the agency’s other clients
- When the bills stop, so too does the results
- More expensive in the long term
Speaking in your brand’s authentic voice is a challenge
Who better to share your own brand’s message than those who directly represent your brand? Giving this very important role to someone external to your team and company will mean that the messaging and delivery will never be as true to the brand as it could be. On top of this, quality control is much harder, because you can’t directly manage team members working in the agency. This means that you lose control and quality often times suffers.
Speed of execution is slower
When a marketing agency is doing the work for you, your team then has to approve the work before anything can go live. Once approved, the agency then has to move forward with the work. If you’re busy during the approval period and can’t get to it until another day/week, your agency may now be busy with other clients and will have to slot in the work they planned on a later day. This creates a time lag between work getting done and work being moved forward, because there is a longer wait time in communication when there is an external party, such as an agency, involved.
You’re competing with the agency’s other clients
When you’re in a personal relationship, you usually don’t want your love and affection being shared with someone. It’s a funny analogy we’ll admit but the point is important resources like time, energy and attention is shared with other clients. Are these clients bigger than you? Do they have more urgent priorities on particular days/weeks where perhaps the focus of your account wavers a bit?
When the bills stop so too do the results
Sure, if you don’t have internal expertise the work can commence and execute faster however there is no long-term investment in your internal team. This means when you terminate your engagement with your agency your internal team really hasn’t developed the skills to pick up the pieces. At the end of the day you paid for execution not for getting the agency to train your team with all the skills and industry tricks of the trade they know.
More expensive in the long term
If an agency does their job right, the client shouldn’t need the agency after a certain amount of time. But we both know that this doesn’t happen. Agencies aim to be paid on an ongoing basis, so in the majority of cases, you’re stuck with them if you want any semblance of expanded growth through marketing. However, this results in a situation where the cost to the business is greater in the long term, because you miss out on saving costs where you wouldn’t have otherwise. For example, if you were able to get to a point where you no longer needed the agency and your team could handle the work themselves, the time your team would save on less time execution time lag means the cost of slow execution or inaction should be far less.
To sum up, taking your digital marketing in house leaves a positive impact on your company and helps you avoid the negatives of outsourcing your marketing.
How to Take Your Digital Marketing in House?
In order to take your digital marketing in house, you must achieve a few things:
- Systems and processes must be built for all marketing related activities in the business.
- Your team must be trained on how to execute all of these systems and processes.
- Leadership buy-in: your company leadership must be bought into the idea of taking your marketing in house.
- Sales and marketing collaboration: your sales team and marketing team must be willing to collaborate and work together. This can be achieved by forming a formal revenue team.
The easiest way to achieve this is to work with a TAYA Partner like RedPandas to help you follow a proven-to-work roadmap so that you can successfully take your digital marketing in house.
You might be thinking, ‘why can’t I do TAYA myself?’ Well, we actually produced an article called ‘The Problems With Doing TAYA Yourself’ which answers this exact question.
So, what’s next?
If you want to take your digital marketing in house, get in contact with our team and learn about how you can achieve self-sufficiency.
