If you own a business, digital marketing is one of the best strategies to help your business grow in every aspect. In fact, not having a solid and strategic marketing campaign is one of the top reasons businesses, especially small businesses, fail.
So the only real question is, should your business invest resources building an in-house team, or hiring a digital marketing agency? This is a highly debated question, so we talked to a top digital marketing agency in Phoenix to learn more about the pros and cons of each to help you make the best decision for your business.
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Building an Inhouse Digital Team
If you have the resources, building an inhouse team has a lot of advantages. First and foremost, convenience. Having everyone under one roof can make access and communication much faster. And because they’re hired for your brand specifically, they’ll have more familiarity with your product or service off the bat, without a lot of explanation or confusion. This also means an inhouse team is exclusively focused on your brand– which can actually be a good and bad thing.
On the surface, all of that seems like a no-brainer but logistically and financially, it can be a pricey endeavor. Not only that, building the right internal marketing team can take a long time with the hiring process alone taking on average around 27 days. Then there’s onboarding, training, and a considerable amount of time before an employee is fully and independently operational.
Next, there’s cost. After you find the right talent, you’ll be paying for salaries, taxes, insurance, equipment, software and more. You’ll also be directly impacted by employee turnover, which means greater strain on your staff, a delay in production, and starting the hiring process all over again.
For big businesses with resources and HR departments, this will be a less daunting and time consuming task. But if you’re a small to medium size business, this translates to time and money directly out of your pocket.
Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency
For most businesses, hiring a digital marketing agency makes the most sense. The out of pocket cost is much less than paying for salaries and benefits for an inhouse team. And you get access to a whole team of specialized professionals with skillsets all across the spectrum of digital marketing like SEO experts and website design experts. You also have more flexibility in the sense that you can pay by the job or find a monthly contract that works for your business.
As we mentioned earlier, having a team focused on just your brand can be a good and bad thing. For example, when you work with an agency who has multiple clients in various industries, they have a lot of insight as to what works in your market and what doesn’t. They also have the perspective to think outside the box and offer fresh, new, creative content without getting too focused on one aspect and becoming redundant or outdated.
On the other hand, perhaps the greatest obstacle to using an agency is finding the right one. If you haven’t noticed, there seems to be hundreds of digital marketing agencies in your area and it’s impossible to tell by websites and reviews alone who is going to be able to exceed your standards and needs.
The experts at Ivio Agency in Phoenix recommend speaking and interviewing agencies to get a better feel for what they offer and how they can specifically help your business. After all, you are trusting someone else with a major part of your business that can have huge impacts on your success. It is worth the time to do your due diligence and find a partner you can trust.