Investis Ltd.

07/23/2021 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 07/23/2021 12:35

In-house vs. Agency Marketing: What is the Difference?

Investis Digital has been presenting content marketing workshops around the world which attract all types of businesses. Many of the conference sessions are focused on content marketing. After listening to these presentations, many of the attendees are excited to get started with or ramp up their content marketing program.

One of their first questions is, who's going to do the work? Some of the companies have established marketing departments and can run with the new information. However, others have maybe one or two people in their marketing departments and they're looking at this as a lot more work on top of what they already do.

As we see it, there are three ways to deploy a content marketing strategy:

  1. Implementing a strategy internally with existing resources (the 'DIY' approach).
  2. Working in conjunction with a content marketing consultant or agency to implement.
  3. Turning over the entire project to an external partner.

Let's explore the advantages and disadvantages of each.

DIY Content Marketing

First of all, can you really do this all by yourself? The short answer is, yes.

Building your own internal content marketing team will take time. Establishing roles, responsibilities, and accountability along with processes will require you to dig deep, establish budgets, create job descriptions, and hire the right people that can give you immediate traction.

It can be a daunting task that will take at least a couple years. Can you and or your leadership wait that long for results? Although it takes time to establish your content marketing team, you can benefit from the direct management of your efforts and resources.

In the DIY case, you can do most/all of the work and just engage with an agency in areas where you haven't hired a subject matter expert or where you feel comfortable with an agency's expertise. More on that later.

There are many tutorials, how-to guides, checklists and quick start guides to learn what you need to do. Here is a quick list of downloads we think you'll find very useful for do it yourself content marketing:

A Practical Guide to Building a Killer Content Strategy

This e-book was developed by HubSpot, a leader in content and inbound marketing. The book covers all aspects of content marketing and provides actionable advice.

Advanced Content Marketing Guide

This resource is chock full of tactical, immediately actionable ideas that you can implement in your own business.

The Customer Journey - How an Owned Audience Can Transform Your Business. This book focuses on the customer journey and how content applied in each stage of the journey can build traffic to your website and in turn build your database of potential customers.

Here are the top considerations when implementing an in-house content marketing program:

  • Content Marketing isn't a campaign: First of all, understand that content marketing isn't a campaign. It isn't something that starts and then stops. It becomes part of your culture…if you do it right. You must commit for the long term whether you do this in-house or use an agency.
  • The best content and ideas will come from your staff : You'll be amazed at the number of great ideas and content that your internal team will help you create. Our company relies heavily on our staff to create the content on our site. The caveat to DIY content marketing is that you need to have a few resources to draw from. A one-person marketing team will have difficulty pulling this off.
  • You will need a content strategy: In order to be successful, you'll need a written digital marketing strategy in place. This strategy will help you identify your audience, your tone and also allow you to plan your resources. By starting with a plan, you'll have an actual roadmap to success. If it isn't written down, it doesn't exist. Content marketing is a team sport and as such needs written documentation in order to be communicated internally and executed effectively.

If you don't start with a plan, you may get a few quick wins but in the long run you will fail. Most content marketing efforts without plans end up creating 'content for content sake' and not for strategic reasons that align with business goals. The written strategy will allow you to create a detailed content calendar for each stage of your customer journey.

Neil Patel, a digital marketing guru, says that your strategy is really a set of goals and as such should follow the S.M.A.R.T. format.

Here is his 5 step goal setting formula that identifies elements you may be lacking in your strategy:

  • Specific: You haven't defined the precise content tactics you will use.
  • Measurable: You aren't measuring your ROI.
  • Attainable: You don't have a clear perspective on the eventual outcome.
  • Relevant: Your content marketing strategy doesn't actually target your business goals.
  • Time-bound: You don't know when you've succeeded.

Benefits of an in-house content marketing team

Company Knowledge

Your in-house marketing team will have the best and most in-depth knowledge about your business, your goals, culture and competition. They should also have clear ideas about your company tone, brand and voice.

Industry

You know your space better than anyone else. With this knowledge you should be able to write better content than anyone else about your space and the competition. Your team should also have clear ideas about your company tone, brand, and voice. It takes time for an agency to learn your business products and services so having an internal team allows you to move faster and be more authoritative with your content.

Efficiencies

Working on an internal team should also give you the advantage of quicker turnaround times and faster approvals. Consider giving small incentives to team members that create content. What gets rewarded gets repeated. Hold people accountable to deadlines that they agree to. Celebrate the great content that your team creates.

Disadvantages of an in-house content marketing team

Content marketing expertise

This can be a very limiting factor. Many companies don't have a content marketing strategist or content writer on staff. A DIY content marketing department is generally started by the team that's handling all the other marketing, and creating content becomes one other thing they're responsible for. Although, there may be capable people on your team, often starting a content marketing program internally is limited by the knowledge, skills and resource availability of your current team.

You can't know everything but agencies have access to more expertise and knowledge as well as lessons learned that can be brought to bear on your plan.

Difficult to scale

Your current team may be so small and busy that adding more responsibilities would not be possible.

Cost

It will cost you to add staff to implement the content marketing plan. You can use existing staff to get started but you'll need additional expertise to fully implement a plan. That usually involves hiring additional staff.

Content marketing in conjunction with an agency

This is a great approach as you can assign an internal resource that is knowledgeable about your company as a liaison with the content marketing agency.

This person becomes the bridge to the agency by alerting them to internal initiatives, goals and by providing the internal knowledge of your company, products and audience they need to be effective.

By having this bridge, you also have the advantage of incorporating agency knowledge into your company. You start to develop your own content marketing DNA.

This is a very natural way to learn about content marketing from the agency and use their expertise to advance your internal knowledge and skills around content marketing.

Should I hand over my content marketing to an agency?

This is a choice many companies make. For those companies that don't have enough resources internally to comprise a team, this is their only real choice. The agency becomes part of their team, coming along side and creating the content needed for their website.

Agencies can also take on complex content. That is, they can create infographics, videos and interactive surveys and quizzes and free guides. This kind of content utilizes specific skills that may not be in place on your current team. These more complex content pieces can help you build your database of potential clients by gating the content and requiring a name and email address to download. Once you have their email address, you can communicate with them on a one-to-one basis. We call this hub and spoke content marketing.

What are the advantages of using a content marketing agency?

Quick start

You can ramp up a program very quickly by utilizing the agency resources and their network of writers.

Deeper insights

Ask yourself this question, 'Do you really want to trust your entire digital marketing efforts to a couple of people, or should you hire an entire team of experienced digital marketing experts?'

An agency can provide a clearer picture of what needs to be done in order to rank for your priority keywords, and give you structure and processes based on their experience and lessons learned.

Agencies have worked with multiple clients and have experience on what is working and what isn't. This can save you time and resources by doing what is known to work rather than going on your own and learning lessons because of your limited knowledge.

Final considerations

Whether you produce content entirely in-house or use an agency, realize you are closest to your customers and your industry. You can create the 'best' content to inform, inspire and teach your audience.

Use an agency to 'scale' the quality and quantity of your content. And learn as much from them as possible to incorporate what you learn into your company's DNA.

Contact Us

To hear more about how we can help you with your content marketing, get in touch!