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Determining how to market your business online is a difficult decision – and one that can have big (not to mention, expensive) consequences affecting your bottom line. Deciding between hiring a team of in-house marketers or hiring a marketing agency does not just come down to price, but maximum efficiency.Having worked with numerous clients over the years as the founder and CEO of my own marketing agency, Mod Girl Marketing, I’m familiar with the pros and cons of hiring a marketing agency over a team of in-house marketers. But don’t just take my word for it! I reached out to fellow marketers and business owners on LinkedIn to get their perspective as well. Check out what they had to say by clicking on the photo below: 
8 Benefits of Hiring A Marketing Agency Over In-House Marketers
Here are 8 benefits of hiring a marketing agency – and reasons why an in-house team might be a better fit, depending on the needs and size of your company.1. You don’t have to pay a marketer’s full-time salary.
Salaries for mid-career marketing professionals can be quite expensive, and they’re increasing every year. From 2016 to 2017, the average salary of a Director of Marketing increased by 17%, and the average salary of a Content Strategist increased by 40%.
In fact, when you hire a full team of marketers instead of hiring a marketing agency, you can end up spending nearly $600,000 a year…plus, you can’t forget to tack on the cost of employee health care benefits, paid vacation days, lost productivity in sick days, and training costs! Marketing Coordinator: $46,756 Marketing Associate: $49,708 Social Media Manager: $55,901 Content Strategist: $87,174 Marketing Manager: $78,429 Director of Marketing: $109,492 VP of Marketing: $163,1342. You get a lot more than just marketing expertise for one fee.
An outside firm offers more than just marketing. When hiring a marketing agency, you get access to expert content writers, search engine optimization professionals, social media professionals, graphic designers, and web design professionals as well.It can be risky to take a gamble on a new hire. Good help is extremely hard to find, and it can take a long time to find truly passionate, dependable, skilled people to work for your business.If your company has the capacity to recruit, hire, and train strong employees for your in-house marketing team, then in-house marketers can be a good option. And since marketers nowadays often have a wide variety of skills, you can find employees that cover all of your marketing needs in a small team if you take the time to find the right people.But when you outsource your marketing, you get to skip the hassle of interviewing individual marketers, and just spend time hiring 1 agency, who will do the hard work of hiring and training of their team members.
Having the right marketing tools on hand can increase efficiency, productivity, and performance. Sure, there are tools you can dig up for free if you know where to look. But hiring a marketing agency gives you access to premium-level services, software, and analytical data reports without charge.Consider the cost of just a handful of the top marketing tools we use at Mod Girl: Bright Local (local SEO) – $79.00/month Hootsuite (social media) – $129/month AWeber (email marketing) – $49/month ReleaseWire (press release distribution, not including writing) – $89 PER releaseAs you can see, these tools can add up fast! Plus, with so many options on the market, you’ll likely have to train any new in-house employee to use the tools your company prefers.With a large enough company, investing in these tools yourself makes sense. But if you don’t have hundreds of employees, you’re often better off hiring a marketing agency and leveraging the tools they have on hand, as well as their expertise in using them.4. You maintain efficiency among your existing staff.
Some companies try to get around hiring in-house marketers, social media personnel, content writers, and SEO people by just having existing employees pick up the slack. But dumping the marketing burden onto existing employees increases the likelihood of burnout and reduces productivity in the long run.In addition, your marketing efforts will lack consistency with so many people involved, especially since this haphazard approach often comes without a strategy.Luckily, digital marketing agencies can help you develop that strategy to ensure you’re making the most of your marketing efforts. You can then either implement the strategy in-house, depending on the availability and skill of your current employees, or hire a digital agency to manage it for you.Related: 8 Ways To Optimize Your Blog Post & Kick Ass At SEORelated: 8 Ways to Guarantee Entrepreneurial Success5. You don’t need to train agencies.
When hiring a marketing agency, you won’t need to send employees to an extensive training program, pay for them to attend a seminar, or pay a senior marketer to groom a new employee in the art of digital marketing. Any reputable marketing agency will arrive qualified, experienced, knowledgeable, and ready to work for you.Marketing agencies come with a track record of results. Plus, marketing agencies are used to taking on new clients. Although any new hire or agency will take time to get to know the specific needs and quirks of your business, an agency takes on new clients all the time, whereas an employee might only switch jobs every few years.In addition, it’s possible to maintain a longer relationship with an agency. You can invest time and money in training an employee, but after a couple of years, they may decide it’s time for a change in their career. When hiring a marketing agency, you can keep working with them for years and years. Even if members of the team change, the agency will be responsible for getting new team members up to speed on your account – not you.6. You can easily scale up your marketing efforts.
Under a traditional in-house operation, the only way you can increase the output of your marketing team is to hire more employees.But marketing agencies already have an arsenal of workers on hand that can be called upon at a moment’s notice if you want to employ a bigger, bolder strategy.Plus, agencies have the experience to help you scale faster. If you want to try Facebook Ads for the first time, for example, you don’t need to pay for one of your employees to take an online course or hire someone new. Your digital marketing agency should be able to adapt to your needs and help you with all of your marketing needs as you grow.