As Internet marketing becomes a vital part to any successful business’s overall business strategy and path to success, more companies are grappling with the prospect of building an in-house team or outsourcing to a marketing agency.
Naturally, most companies have many reservations about hiring marketing agencies, for fear they will let things slip through the cracks where an in-house team would succeed. However, by adhering to some best practices, marketing agencies can quell these fears, and businesses can shift their resources and attention to other aspects of the business.
1: Decrease Turnaround Time
The reason many businesses are opting for in-house teams rather than outsourcing their marketing to professional companies is the quicker turnaround time of in-house teams. Because members of the business know the company backwards and forwards, they are able to push through decisions much more quickly. This is a huge advantage when it comes to the lightning-fast marketing that needs to be done on behalf of a business within the modern business landscape.
In order for an outsourced company to match this kind of performance, it must dedicate itself to learning its clientele and their industries. The only way an outside company will be able to match the appropriate level of speed and productivity of an in-house marketing group is to understand what makes each company tick and to respond accordingly.
2: Become More Familiar with the Business
One of the most important aspects of marketing is the analysis of statistics. Those analytics lead to much better improvements in a marketing campaign over the long term. Without them, a business may find itself performing the dreaded “seesaw effect” when it comes to search engine optimization results and overall online marketing results.
Analyzing a business requires learning it much more deeply than most outside marketing agencies are willing to do. However, the extra performance that will stem from utilizing the most appropriate information to interpret analytics more than makes up for the time spent learning about the company.
3: Focus on Quality Visuals and Slogans
Perhaps the most important part of any outbound marketing campaign is the ability of the campaign manager to sum up the message of the company in a tight logo and a short slogan. Without these things in place, there is not much hope for a business to gain traction with an audience in today’s fast-paced marketing environment.
Most agencies that are outsourced try very generic solutions before they break down a business individually and attempt to sum up its message within a logo and slogan. In order to maximize production time and productivity for a business, an outsourced marketing company would do much better to look at its client as an individual and tailor its logo and slogan accordingly.
4: Stay Very Cost-Effective
Although cost should be much farther down the priority list for many businesses than it is, most business owners look at the budget first, before they consider any productivity statistics. It is definitely true that most in-house marketers are much more cost-effective than outsourced marketing.
Outsourced marketers tend to bloat hours because they have no reason to streamline a marketing process for a client—other than the client’s catching on and disallowing the behavior. However, in order for a marketing company to gain a reputation within an industry, it should learn to streamline its own procedures so that it can become as cost-effective as an in-house marketing agency.
5: Keep Your Eye on the Solution to the Next Problem
The one constant behind each and every marketing campaign is that it must be in a state of constant change to keep up with its industry. In-house marketers, as masters of their industry, will have a good understanding of when it is time to make a change to a marketing campaign.
Third-party marketing companies would do well to mimic the behavior of in-house marketing agents by remaining diligent in their industry research. Technology is moving forward at a rapid pace, and no company can afford to fall behind.
