Why Retailers are Keeping Marketing In-House
In the constantly expanding world of marketing, it’s becoming clear that those who are able to advertise effectively will see the best results. On social media, websites, and with organic growth from search engine optimization, it’s a constant battle to go one better than the competition and get a brand name in front of a particular audience. With this in mind, it has raised the question of whether marketing is more effective as an outsourced activity or whether it should be moved back in-house.
For a time, the solution was simple — send all marketing activities to external marketing specialists. However, The Association of National Advertisers first noticed a trend of businesses bringing marketing back in-house in 2013 and it has only grown since.
In this guide, we’re going to examine the trend to see whether this would be the right move for your own business. Where should your marketing efforts take place? What are the dangers of losing your external partner? How can you decide between the two options?
Benefits of Keeping Marketing In-House (or bringing it back)
First, let’s look at why you should consider insourcing.
Slow and Unchanging Agencies — During the height of marketing outsourcing, advertising agencies were allowed to grow exponentially. Suddenly, they had dozens of important clients and were hiring a new employee every week just to keep up. However, we’re now hearing stories of agencies who are ‘too big’. When an agency grows too big, they become slow not only with clients but to react to the ever-changing marketing world.
In fact, one executive has even spoken out about how their company has ‘too many people’. Originally, businesses liked the idea of outsourcing to small agencies that did nothing except advertise every single day. Now, these same agencies have too many moving pieces to operate in real-time.
Many business owners are growing frustrated at the lack of flexibility agencies seem to have. While owners know the real value right now is in social media and content marketing, agencies seem to be persistently chasing ‘advertising’ instead. It’s true that some companies have created their own social ‘sub-brands’, but they’re still led by traditional advertisers and this is causing a problem.
Growing Importance of Customer Relationships — With marketing, everything seems to come in waves and it’s fair to say customer relationship management is now important once again. With the eruption of ‘fake news’, untrustworthy influencers, and a lack of transparency across all industries, it’s becoming essential to manage customer relationships with caution.
In 2019, ‘personalization’ is a buzzword and fewer brands are finding what they need from outsourcing. Considering voice and consistency is so important, businesses want to manage their own message and build relationships with consumers that they desire.
Industry Knowledge — More and more, people in the marketing niche are starting to speak out about the knowledge and skills of those in the industry, and there seems to be a focus on a one-size-fits-all approach as we alluded to earlier.
The spike in outsourcing meant that the industry had to generate so-called ‘cookie cutter’ solutions that could be applied on a wider scale. With so many clients on the books, personalization ended, and agencies would apply the same strategies time and time again.
With insourcing, you take control of your strategy and really choose the solutions that allow you to infiltrate your target market. Whether it’s on Facebook, a website, Quora, or somewhere else entirely, you regain control and can adjust much faster to the changing market.
Read More: Adding Quora to Your Marketing Strategy
Improved Marketing Automation — Many years ago, agencies really were the specialists because they were the only people who truly understood what it meant to be successful in marketing. What’s more, for the cost and time it would take to learn, it was cheaper to outsource. Now, we’re in a different time and brilliant marketing automation tools are making it easier than ever.
Read More: Simplify Your Workflow by Adding Marketing Automation
For example, thousands of data points are assessed in seconds, information is gathered and reviewed, and actionable steps are suggested by the very best. As long as you produce high-quality content and maintain the automation platforms, you can scale your efforts…well, effortlessly.
With one leading consumer goods company, they apparently saw a jump from 20% to 83% in on-time launch rate after setting up their own in-house marketing systems. Not only were digital media activities released sooner, they were more effective too. Ad viewing figures increased by 42%, they saw a boost in sales seven times over, and they were able to do six times more programmatic campaigns.
Own the Data — Finally, there’s a growing importance to ‘own the data’ with marketing. With every single business, they have their own consumer touch points gathering all sorts of data. By keeping this in-house, it can be used to test promotional offers, shape content, and reach out to your specific market. As the marketing team shares information with R&D, customer service, fulfilment, and every other department, the whole company can act on insights almost instantly.
Again, this comes back to customer relationships and building a lasting connection with an audience.
Risks of Insourcing Marketing
Of course, there are pros and cons to most business decisions. Before deciding on what’s best for your own company, you need to understand what the drawbacks of insourcing may be.
Difficulty with Hiring — Firstly, you may have to hire a specialist; as we know, not all recruitment works well. Moreover, there may even be an issue attracting the sort of talent you need for your service. According to many reports, there’s a talent gap right now in the digital marketing industry and this is causing problems. Not only do you need to attract them, you need to offer them the right benefits and pay to keep them happy when their skills are sought after everywhere.
Cost Uncertainties — Rather than paying an amount per month and understanding exactly how this will change with scaling, you’ll enter a world where the leaps between costs can be great. If you start with one employee, what happens when they don’t have enough work? When is the right time to expand and hire another employee?
With most companies who insource marketing, they don’t enjoy a return immediately so this will be important to remember. You’ll be paying for new technologies to provide the marketing employee with the tools they need to succeed. In the process of doing this, you might actually realize that your agency was cutting the cost of certain tools just to keep your business.
Loss of Data — If you’re just starting a business, this won’t be a concern because everything will start from scratch. For those bringing marketing back in-house, you need to be ready for a loss of data as technology licenses change. In order for the transition to be seamless, you would need to use the same technology as the agency. Otherwise, there needs to be a plan in place to deal with the short-term inefficiencies that may occur.
Which is Right for My Business?
This is the big question, and we’ve seen that there are both benefits and drawbacks to bringing marketing in-house. Before doing anything, we recommend looking at your current marketing strategy. If you’re currently seeing desired results from your outsourced marketing, sales are great, lead generation is strong, and you’re getting the personalization and customer relationship management you want, this isn’t necessarily a change you need to make.
Looking ahead, do you feel as though your agency will be able to keep up with the changing demands of your industry? Have you had a conversation with them about this concern? Often, a simple conversation will tell you everything you need to know about the viability of your partnership.
On the other hand, you may feel as though the agency isn’t hitting the right note. If so, the first step would be a full audit of your current marketing activities. Where do your strengths lie? Would you need to hire talent? What are your immediate priorities?
Rather than making the expensive decision to instantly change everything, there could be an opportunity to manage the agency for specific activities. If not, perhaps some media companies could help with branded content and in the areas in which the agency is lacking? If you reconsider the foundations of your marketing spending, you might spot new chances to become more efficient.
Read More: In House Vs Agency Marketing
Summary
These days, even new businesses inept at digital marketing are able to handle marketing activities with some degree of success. Although startups have a blank canvas on which to draw, this doesn’t mean more established brands can’t make the change too — as long as the decision can be justified in the long-term, the effort will be worthwhile.
