In-house vs Agency, how things have changed
Lyndon Antcliff
Expert Content Marketing Freelancer | SEO Specialist | Content Strategy Consultant
Amazing how much you learn helping in-house teams become better content marketers. and it's always a thrill saving small business a few thousand in agency fees.
A lot of in-house teams can save a lot of cash by being taught a few simple techniques within an effective strategy, it's not rocket science. It's common for outside agencies to over complicate things for various reasons. But information has become free or very low cost, which means as long as the in-house have the right mindset they can quickly get up to speed.
When it comes down to it, agencies are good at implementation, they are able to focus on process and make it more efficient. But bad at representing the values of the client to the outside world.
Also most agencies have a hard time with creativity, this may be because they need to focus on the process and getting the overhead down to increase their profit. But creativity is like a slippery hog when it's raining. You need a creative team to be away from the grind of stuff like outreach, which is best given to people who don't mind the grunt work.
Thus, when it comes to content marketing, in-house is usually best. They know the heart of soul of their business and value it higher. The in-house vs agency thing used to be weighted in favour of the agencies, for various reasons (that's for another blog post), but the in-house world have caught up. The methodologies are no longer a mystery and tools are easy to get, no need to rely on the proprietary software tool of the high priced agencies.
If you track the life of an agency worker, after a few years they burn out, get promoted, move in-house, go freelance, spend 3 years in a Vietnam prison for smuggling tax free Timtams. Actually, that's not entirely true, most who go freelance don't last long and seek the warm embrace of a paycheck. Hey, it's brutal out there.
Don't get me wrong, I love agencies, I have trained many of them and they are nearly all brilliant. But some need to understand that doing creative and implementation with the same team will cause insanity.
The solution, outsource the creativity or create two teams to focus on the different mindsets. Do not kill the creative team with grunt work. I think the in-house crowd understand this more.
Although I am sure your agency is different.
Managing Director at Business Hunters
8 年I think it depends on what you are trying to achieve, as digital marketing now covers such a wide variety of areas. If you are looking into international markets with the use of native speakers with multiregional cultural topics to take into account for content, as well as multilingual social media, I think Agency is the best option as costs for this for in-house would be very expensive and time consuming. I know this, because we do it.
B2B Performance Marketing Leader (15 YoE) | Ex-LinkedIn & Google | Paid Search, Social & Programmatic | Driving Scalable Growth
8 年From an Online Marketing Operations PoW, you should always run it in-house: It's 10x cheaper (Wage vs 10~15% agency fee), you grow your own CoE and increase your ROI overtime and you are independant. Challenges will be that you do need to train the person and make sure that he/she has a back-up.
Strategy at The Display Centre
8 年Working with an agency is like working with any other consultant. The insight, true understanding and commitment always resides in-house. You are buying an external perspective informed by working with a wide variety of other clients which cannot be provided from in-house. Expecting anyone from outside the business to solve your problems is foolish. Being open minded enough to consider an external viewpoint is what clever people excel at.
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8 年I'm with Marty, a lot of times the agency isn't very creative and focus too much on accepting payment on a monthly basis. I've interviewed two VERY well known enterprise agencies and was appalled at what they called Excellent work. Gave me shivers thinking that large brands are eating this stuff up.
Marketing, Operations & Yoga Instruction | Driving Customer Acquisition and Efficiency with Empathy and Analytics | Passionate about Wellness in the Workplace
8 年I totally agree that agencies love overcomplicating.. But the right agencies have two separate divisions.. Creative services and operations.. I think it depends on the agency.. Also, I believe a lot more companies are becoming publishers and so inevitably in house teams will create their own content which I think is the best thing to do.. But I do believe outsourcing is the right answer to scaling operations as long as the in house team sets the strategy..