Because every minute of our lives is chronicled on social media today, we will cover the fundamental differences between employing an in-house team or an agency in this article. It’s almost become an unspoken requirement that you must have a social media identity that reflects your work. Because social media provides an equal and open playing field for everyone, and you can take advantage of it.
If you want to scale up your social media marketing, you’ll need a team of capable employees who can manage and execute your strategy.
But, should you recruit someone in-house or through an agency?
There are compelling reasons for both, and the choice is mostly dependent on your circumstances.
Stay with me to figure out which decision is better for you.
What’s the difference between working in-house and working with an agency?
Internal social media marketing is centered on a marketing team that your firm maintains to market your organization.
Working with an agency is a whole different experience. A social media agency employs an outsourced or external marketing staff that you pay to promote your company. Let’s take a closer look at the differences between in-house and agency work.
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 are entirely focused on your company. The agency, on the other hand, will first get to know your brand before devoting personnel and time to its social media marketing strategy. It’s also possible that the team allocated to your project collaborates with other clients.
Due to various duties, the agency with whom you’ve collaborated may not be able to fully invest in your firm. However, keep in mind that even if an agency is working with numerous customers at the same time, it may still be able to help you achieve your business objectives.
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 the best social media management company, 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 in-house or agency, 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 best social media management company.
