Making Digital Marketing Agency A Natural Extension Of Your Business- A Good Or Bad Idea?

Gone are the days when the customers listen to music through old FM radio. Now, they prefer to stream the music right on the mobile. Chasing the evolving user’s needs, the businesses are breaking out the old FM radio (Traditional marketing) and turning towards digital marketing embracing advanced technologies to market a business and deliver value to the customers.

Eliminating the guesswork, digital marketing reaches out the customers in an exceedingly organized and highly targeted way to offer the amazing experience in the real-time. But, measurable marketing and ROI can only be brought by the team of strategists, marketing, creatives, and coding superheroes. The complete team that works under one roof is referred to as a digital marketing agency.

What does digital marketing agency do?

Basically, the digital marketing agency keep their focus on three things: maximize the business profits by creating USP after identifying the brand’s needs and crafting a powerful strategy; establish brand authority, credibility, and organic search ranking online through effective content strategies; ensures steady and reliable boost in revenue with continuous testing and marketing strategies modification.

It indicates working with digital marketing agencies means the brand building, more leads and increased conversion that guarantees long-term sales growth.

However, there are brands such as WPP, P&G, Unilever, L’Oreal, and Public is that are favoring the second route- ‘Hiring in-house talent’ for digital marketing activities. In the course of years, the shift from a marketing agency to the in-house agency is gaining momentum due to sheer transparency, brand safety, greater control, cost-saving, and more. The revolution is stirring and making the brands to move the digital marketing in-house.

Take a quick glance at why the companies are showing more inclination towards developing its own digital marketing agency?

Bringing media buying in-house

The agencies when buying the programmatic ads from advertisers, they have lesser control over the data and they are unaware of where the data is used. That’s why brands like- Kelloggs or Netflix have brought programmatic ads buying in-house to improve control and transparency over the user’s data. Also, in-house media buying enable significant savings, safeguard data against unscrupulous individuals, and allow leveraging new ad-tech that makes media competent.

Creating their own media

The creative management platforms by ending the reliance on external ad agencies, allow the in-house team to create a diverse range of media in all digital formats. The new ad-tech maximize the production efficiency, let the team be creative, and reduce time while designing the media idea to making it live in the marketing campaign. CMP removes the need for external collaboration, translation management, and ad optimization that’s associated with agencies.

Getting control over user’s data

Post-GDPR, it has become all-important to not share the user’s data, and building in-house marketing agency is supporting the initiative as the agency don’t have access to the user’s data which can potentially work on and use the data with the competitors. Having control on the user’s data at first opens up new opportunities such as optimizing the data and sending personalized messages. Also, the performance of advertising can be quantified, and the strategy can be tailored accordingly.

Moving business into agile orbits

The world is going agile where only those brands thrive in the market that is able to respond to the changes in a few moments. When working with agencies, the brands have to wait for how agency react to changes, decisions made, and then changes are put into action. Here, employing an in-house team is an agile route to market the offerings, improve the workflows, and update the campaign in the real-time.

Related: The Common Mistakes That Companies Make While Moving Into The Agile Orbits

Greater transparency in metrics

Different agencies use different metrics to define the performance standards, which sometimes differ from the brand’s understanding and thereafter making the analytical decisions become very difficult. By developing an internal marketing team, the brands can define the clear and universal metrics that make it easy to view and understand the ad performance. The brands know where the ads are served, how much is spent on them, and how they are performing in terms of ROI. It increases transparency, diminishes ad fraud, and heighten brand safety, which makes spending dollars on developing in-house team worth.

How does it work like a pro for the companies?

Moving the brand’s digital marketing by developing in-house digital marketing team is a simple choice that works great in the sense- the businesses already have talent who are familiar with the goals, vision, and mission of the company and have a good understanding of the niche markets, and they are just required to be upskilled to immerse in the business processes and achieve the digital marketing goals.

The internal talent or hiring of new resources to build a digital marketing team can be a perfect fit based on the variety of factors that are directly related to the business and shape the future. They are:

• Is the company has all the needed talent to maintain the brand’s online presence? If not, the company is able to find qualified candidates who are great at the job or not.
• Does the company have sufficient funds to build and maintain the digital marketing team and efforts?
• Will all the functions performed by in-house? If not, it’s necessary to decide which functions will be handled by in-house and third-party agencies.
• Does the company has required technology infrastructure to execute in-house marketing activities? If not, the company has set aside the budget to evolve technology infrastructure.
• Are the projected outcomes from owned or hybrid models decided? If not, it’s necessary to set metrics ahead of time to assess the performance and maximize the ROI.

When the company has a pool of resources that can work together for predictable targets, managers to handle the team, and the considerable budget, then executing unique marketing strategy with an in-house team helps in achieving business objective and increasing business growth.

Stay open to the challenges that are certain to come:

When we take the hat off the success that in-house marketing agency development model brought to the businesses, the industry has witnessed both losers and winners. The reason is even the established agencies following the in-house trend not aptly defined the digital destiny, failed to craft the compelling experiences and overlooked the foreseeable challenges.

Let’s dig deeper:

• In order to diversify the marketing activities, it’s essential to have diversified talents such as marketing strategist, marketing manager, designers, copywriters, and developers in place. However, investing heavily into hiring the full-time employees is worth only when are marketing needs are significant, else it works as overhead.

• Post-hiring the team, there will be an adjustment period, in addition, there is no guarantee that they will work at full efficiency and also, risks losing the member when they get bored with the job. The employee turnover cripples marketing efforts.

• It’s a bit harsh, but true that advertising platforms work hard to deliver the best results and offer perks (Early access to alpha and beta program, instant support and more attention on the accounts) to the businesses that spend millions of dollars on ad spend. Unless the business is as giant as Walmart, merit the attention of ad platforms and getting the competitive advantage of perks is nearly impossible.

• Hiring an in-house team seems expensive for the short-term, but it becomes a cost-effective option when marketing goals are broader.

• The agencies work with an outside point of view as they have years of experience in dealing with clients and their niche markets. To get very creative and acting upon the insight and analytics is critical for the in-house team.

Over to you
The complete guide describes there are two roads- outsourcing to a marketing agency or developing an in-house marketing team to successfully execute the online marketing activities and establish your brand. It’s time-critical, money-critical, and efforts-critical decision for the brands to pick one of the roads. Developing in-house team revolution is thrilling and here to stay.

The brands are triumphing the market choosing the latter option when they have used the right mix of talent, technology, and budget to plan the strategic marketing initiatives and execute them like a pro.

If you are still unsure with which way to go, breakdown your objectives, needs, and how much you can spend, then figure out which will be the best approach to advance, prosper, and flourish the business in every way. Moreover, you can partner with digital consultants that will help you in determining which approach (In-house, outsource, or hybrid) is the best suited for your business.

Make the right choice to bring grandiose upshots at every step of the way!