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Benefits of hiring a Digital Marketing Agency to Supplement your in-house Marketing Team

Should we do our digital marketing in-house or partner with a digital marketing agency?

You may not be surprised to hear this is a question we hear often.

And you know what – there is no universal right or wrong answer. This can often lead to business owners feeling unsure about which is the right option for their marketing. You want to feel assured that you’re making the right choice with the biggest Return on Investment (ROI) possible.

That’s why it’s not about choosing between an internal or external marketing team; picking one or the other, it’s really more of a spectrum. A combination of the two might be the most effective way to optimise your marketing budget. However, choosing the perfect balance of internal and external marketing resources will be different for every business. You’ll need to find the magic blend that works for yours.

In this article, we will explore the pros and cons of opting for an in-house digital marketing team and how your business can benefit from hiring an external digital marketing agency to supplement your marketing efforts.

Start by defining your marketing goals

Before you start to assemble an in-house marketing team or partner with an agency, we recommend taking a step back; define your marketing goals.

Are there certain skills you are looking to fill? Or, maybe you need help creating a new brand strategy. When you know exactly what you want to accomplish, the decision of where and how you need to allocate your resources will become clear.

a board of marketing strategies

Hiring an in-house marketing team

For some businesses, keeping their digital function in-house just makes sense. At first glance, it may seem that hiring an in-house marketing team is more advantageous for your business. A marketing team of in-house employees provides more hands-on control meaning you can meet with them at any point, get status updates, take more control of the process and reinforce when something is not working. This level of autonomy and ownership can be hard to achieve with an agency.

In-house marketing teams are only focused on your brand. Your internal employees will have a strong familiarity with your company culture, vision and goals. They have the capacity to learn and understand your brand on a deeper level and tailor all marketing decisions to stay in line with both your company culture and vision to achieve in-house business goals.

You can often gain greater control over the execution of your marketing strategy. Hiring an in-house team means that you will have a more thorough oversight of what is happening, and the flexibility to change direction quickly. Additionally, you may have the ability to meet with your team at any point during the work day or week, especially if you are in a physical space.

An in-house team can achieve a stronger sales and marketing alignment. When your sales and marketing team work side by side, it is often easier to pinpoint what is working and what isn’t. You may be able to get direct feedback on the content that’s closing more deals, and the rate at which it is happening.

Benefits of Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency

Regardless of the decision you make, you will need talented people that can take charge and execute your strategy.

Whilst an in-house team can provide some clear benefits, do you feel prepared to hire and manage a team of marketing specialists to cover all branches of digital marketing?

It’s simply not possible to have the experience and knowledge of an agency of digital marketing experts with a small in-house team or a single Digital Marketing Manager. This is often why hiring a digital marketing agency to supplement your in-house marketing efforts can be the most effective outcome for your business.

But, how can supplementing with a Digital Marketing Agency can benefit your business? Here’s how…

Partnering with a digital marketing agency gives businesses access to an entire team of specialised and experienced professionals and skill sets, when your business needs them.

If you’re a small business, you probably don’t have enough work (or financial resources) to bring on a full-time web developer, SEO specialist, content writer, CRO strategist and social media writer. Are we right?

But, it would be hard to find a business that wouldn’t benefit from each of these services.

Ultimately, these may not be specialist skills that you need day-in-day-out which means you’ll either be:

  1. Paying you specialist for idol time, or
  2. very commonly, asking your specialist to do tasks that are not in the speciality e.g., “Hey web developer, can you design a website and make it SEO friendly.”

Often most businesses don’t need a full time or even part time, SEO specialist, content writer, CRO specialist etc. But they are essential in executing a successful digital strategy. Partnering with an agency gives you access to those skill sets and professionals allowing you to diversify your marketing efforts and draw on the experience of each.

At Business Assist, we have highly experienced experts that specialise in various digital elements, that can assist on projects or take charge when it falls into their discipline. Our commitment to fostering continual learning and growth also ensures our employees are up to date on the best strategies and techniques for our clients.

team of marketing experts

Partnering with an agency is much less commitment than hiring a full in-house team. If you decide to build your marketing team in-house you’ll become responsible for recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, or training, and any other time-consuming and often expensive exercises that come with hiring new team members.

If that doesn’t ‘float your boat’, then an agency that you can trust and communicate effectively with can take care of that instead.

You focus on your business, we’ll focus on the marketing.

At Business Assist we don’t lock our clients into fixed-term contracts. We limit your risk and provide you with the “freedom to walk.” Our focus on transparency is vital to our client relationships. Everything we do is transparent, measured, reported and accountable – minimising your risk.

Digital agencies have access to advanced tools and systems that can either be expensive to acquire or are not practical for one company to have. Having the right systems, programs and subscriptions are key to executing great work. Agencies can justify having access to exclusive resources as they are used every day across multiple projects, which often isn’t the case for smaller businesses.

Agencies optimise their systems and tools to ensure they are not just meeting, but exceeding industry standards when it comes to digital marketing implementation and reporting.

Pro’s of an in-house team:

  • Brand Focused
  • Greater Control
  • Sales & Marketing Alignment

Pro’s of a digital marketing agency:

  • Wealth of specialists and experience
  • No responsibility for hiring a team of experts
  • Access to software and memberships
  • Less commitment and low risk

Summary

Striking the right balance between internal and external marketing resources might take some adjustment to get right. You need to find a balance that works for you. Perhaps your business requires the need for an internal team to execute your vision with the help of an agency partner for big-picture projects. Or maybe one marketing manager in-house is the right way to go, to provide a clear channel of communication between your business and your dedicated agency partner.

Wherever your company lands on the spectrum, it’s clear that there are many advantages to combining a digital marketing agency to complement your in-house marketing team.

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Free 25 Page eBook

Download the Influencing Your Digital Marketing Metrics ebook

Growth in numbers translates to growth in business, learn about the digital marketing KPI’s that can dramatically boost your business trajectory.

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Niki Patterson

Business Assist help us with the growth of our business, which is what every business wants, and also it really feels like everyone on the team understands and knows your business well. It’s not just one person, everyone is somehow involved and I appreciate that. Thank you so much for all your hard work in fixing our campaigns. We are all incredibly appreciative.

Jo McMillan

Business Assist were a pleasure to work with as we developed our new website. They were responsive, considered and always sought to provide us with the best possible product at a competitive price. We are very happy with the website they produced for us and have had a lot of positive comments on it. Business Assist is also great with follow up and ongoing support, should we need it.

Dean Burns

We only launched Rent Busters Perth in November 2018, so it is incredible that Business Assist generated over 500 leads for us in June 2020!  They helped us with our branding, market positioning and have since worked very closely with us on developing new offers, headings and campaigns every month. And most importantly we are signing a record number of deals every month!

Business Assist are more like our business partner than supplier and we heavily rely on their expertise and the results they deliver are extraordinary – I can’t recommend them more highly.

Lisa Bywaters

We’ve been working with Steve and the team at Business Assist since 2010.  With an information dense website it’s vital for us that our visitors find the information they need, when they need it. The BA team understand that people search for information in an organic way, that it’s not a linear process. By using their expertise, we now have a friendly, welcoming website that allows visitors to find the information they need quickly and easily. They were also extremely helpful when we transitioned to our new name and new website – with everything from developing a new website that incorporated consumer and staff feedback, to developing an SEO strategy and Google Ads campaigns that helped us retain our past users and attract new ones. They’re a professional, friendly team that takes the time to get to know the needs of your organisation and your website users.

Tony Raunic

A few years ago Hunt & Hunt Lawyers decided to put more resources into our SEO.  We interviewed a number of contractors who all promised their services would be superior.  We were struck by Steve Foura and his team’s preparedness to invest time in learning about what was distinctive about our business and what we particularly wanted to achieve.

We appointed Business Assist to focus on SEO improvements for aspects of our property team marketing including our compulsory acquisition advisory services.

The results have been outstanding with web-based enquiries growing exponentially and, critically, the right prospective clients contacting us and invariably converting into fee paying clients.

We certainly recommend Business Assist highly for any professional services business looking to better leverage its internet presence.

Ultimately, Hunt & Hunt asked Business Assist to develop a new website for our national legal group and we are very pleased with the results.

We continue to work with Business Assist today across various teams as we derive great value from Steve’s practical layman’s advice on SEO.  Business Assist also understand our business and genuinely seem to go the extra mile to add value.

Robert Thorpe

It felt that our previous digital agency was not very engaged with our business – there was a real disconnect.  With Business Assist we feel like we’re talking to the people who are actually implementing the campaign, or at least have a very good understanding of it.  We believe this is one of the main  reasons we saw results happen straightaway – increased new customer inquiries from Australia and overseas. But the other thing we get is great advice from Business Assist about things we can and can’t do from a Digital Marketing perspective. We trust really these guys. The other thing we’re getting is the changes we’re asking to make or services we’re changing, it happens really fast – there’s nothing like a 2 week period of waiting.

Amanda Greer

We’re a small business but we try and behave like a bigger company and Business Assist help us lift that bar. They have helped us get ahead of our competitors. We have a strategy meeting soon where we will develop a 5 year plan and we look forward to Business Assist’s input and planning what we should be working with them on for the next 5 years.  Business Assist have a  really good personable team and they tailor to us – we really like the flexibility. We’re very strategic in what we do and Business Assist helps us enhance our competitive advantage by reacting to opportunities quickly. Our position, interests and needs are well aligned.

Dave Porter

Business Assist are responsible for our new leads coming in. Increasingly, we are becoming more and more reliant on digital marketing as the other avenues are either too expensive or deliver little or no return. So we are extremely reliant on Business Assist.  And they have delivered for us for many years and continue to do so in 2020 where we keep having all-time record revenue weeks! We also really appreciate the team at Business Assist and I’ve always enjoyed working with a company that we feel as though they are really part of our team. We have a very healthy working relationship.

Karl Zimmerman

Since hiring Business Assist to take over our in-house Digital Marketing management, our Google Adwords spend has gone down by 75-80% and our traffic has increased by over 150%. To see such a massive drop in spend and yet an increase in traffic has to be one of the biggest and most impressive things I have ever seen.

Also, compared to what we were getting before, we see Business Assist basically as a free investment with the high returns and the increase in traffic we are getting. Not only that, each time we face any problems, the team gives us much valued solutions, not just ‘yes, we can fix that’ but also different options to choose from.

Business Assist gave us the ability to trust them with our money compared to the other 3-4 companies we had before them. We now can see where our money is going and the returns for it. They also take the time to explain details to us and make sure we are given regular updates. As we grow as a business, we see us growing with Business Assist.

Brayden Cameron

We have been using the Business Assist team since 2013. Coming from a trade background in Roofing & Roofing maintenance and jumping into Digital for all that is involved is a daunting task. We know everything worth knowing about our own trade and Digital is such an unknown area. In turn we were so hesitant because we felt like we were getting ripped off from previous attempts with other agencies and any requests for information or advice would have an extra charge or a feel like such an up-sell. Upon working with the Business Assist team we have COMPLETE clarity around the following:

  • Cost Vs Conversion (analytics)
  • Competitor analysis
  • Our target market and how to attract them
  • Brand Strategy Marketing
  • Social Media
  • SEO & so much more.

Providing these services should be a given for any Digital company – however we have found that it is not. Providing this whilst maintaining honesty and transparency even educating us along the way, whilst not making us feel like idiots because we didn’t know certain terms throughout the process is the real benefit working with Business Assist. We have meetings every week / fortnight with the team to report on every aspect of the business on a digital front. We feel the Business Assist team is an extension of our 40 + family. I think we are really fortunate we found a company that propelled us to grow from 2 staff to 40+ in 7 years – they know our company as if it was their own!