Every moment of our life is documented on social media today. It is almost an unsaid rule now, that you must have social media identity that is in line with the work you do. Because social media offers an equal and open ground for all and you can make the most out of it. If you want to scale up your social media marketing, you will need efficient staff that can take charge of and executes your strategy. But should you create your own in-house social media team or hire an agency partner? There are enthralling reasons for both, and it mostly depends on your situation. Stay with me to figure out which decision is better for you.
In-House vs. Agency… what is the difference?
In-house social media marketing revolves around an internal marketing team, which your company maintains to market your business.
Working with an agency is quite different. Social media agency uses an outsourced or external marketing team, which you pay to use in marketing your business.
In-House Social Media Marketing:
Building an internal marketing team to manage, develop, and execute your social media marketing strategy. It comes with few advantages. As a general rule, an in-house team provides the authority with a tighter and more focused team.
Pros:
The benefits of in-house marketing include:
Employees are more focused:
In-house marketing teams focus solely on your business. While the agency will learn your brand first and then dedicate employees and time to its marketing strategy. There are also chances that the team assigned to your project most likely works with other clients too.
Juggling multiple responsibilities means the agency you are partnered with may not be able to invest 100% with your company. But keep in mind if an agency is working with multiple clients at a time, may still have the potential to achieve your business goals.
Brand familiarity:
When you have an in-house team, they know your brand, which reflects all their marketing decisions and materials. While agencies will take time to learn your company’s value, tone, and overall brand.
More autonomy:
As a social media manager, you will have the responsibility only for your brand’s audience. In an agency, you need to report to several clients from different industries. This gives you more autonomy to make changes, experiment without consulting stakeholders, and diversify strategies.
Cons:
Building an in-house team comes with some drawbacks, though, including:
You might miss diversity:
Working with one brand only might make you lose interest in time. Though working in-house helps you understand better and stay focused. But boredom may knock at the door from time to time to see if you are up for a challenge.
More expense on resources:
Creating an in-house team working on social media marketing can sometimes turn out to be more expensive. It sometimes may lead to tunnel vision where the team members are so driven by company emotions and values that they are unable to foresee any shortcomings.
Scalability:
When you can scale your business and marketing efforts, it is a tremendous benefit. Unfortunately, it is very difficult for in-house teams to scale than agency teams.
With in-house marketing, you have limited resources and limited staff. To scale your efforts, you need to either hire another team member or decrease work, which takes time.
Outsourcing to Social Media Agency:
Social media marketing agencies are companies that help other businesses by performing a specific function, development, marketing, or design. They act as a great substitute for an in-house team, serving the same labor function but outside the organization.
Pros:
Here are the advantages of working with a social media marketing agency:
Diverse skills:
When you hire an agency, you are not hiring just one employee. You are hiring a whole team, which may sometimes be ten or more employees.
Working with the agency may help you with SEO, you may find that they have experts that can help in producing content or even designers that can assist you to improve your user experience. This provides more perspective and flexibility in your work.
Transparent vetting:
While hiring in-house, it gets difficult to accurately wet the quality of hire. References turn out to be useful, but employers choose to stay on the safe side and give a positive reference to prevent any potential legal trouble.
However, in agencies, clients are very vocal and transparent if the agency has underperformed. You can easily excess client’s reviews about a particular agency on their websites before deciding to work with them.
Scalable:
Scaling a business isn’t easy. The key challenges that come with scaling are:
- Getting the right talent
- Getting enough new customers
Partnering with the right agency can help you achieve these two scaling challenges.
Software and tools:
When hiring an agency, your company doesn’t need to worry about researching and purchasing marketing tools. Your agency will have all the access to marketing tools already. Marketing agencies also have marketing software that makes tracking and measuring your marketing campaign easier
Cons:
Working with a social media marketing agency does come with its baggage of drawbacks, including:
Control:
Organizations that prefer to complete authority over their marketing campaign will encounter some growing pains when working with a social media marketing agency. This is because agencies tend to work with some freedom.
Always keep in mind, trusting your agency can also help your organization reduce the bottlenecks that come with outsourcing marketing.
Location:
You can find several marketing agencies across the world, which becomes a drawback for companies that want to work with a local marketing company. For instance, maybe you find the perfect agency for your company, but they are across the country. And this situation can get challenging when aligning schedules.
If you decide to hire an agency in a different time zone, choose the one that has experience with such client relationships.
Conclusion:
Whether you hire an agency or build your own in-house team, it will come down to your unique situation. You need to consider all the variables like cost, your market, and most importantly your ability to create a great team. Also, remember that it doesn’t have to be a binary decision. The best route to success may be a combination of few in-house hires supplemented with a social media marketing agency.
