Should You Build In-House or Outsource Marketing?

How to make the smartest marketing investment for long-term growth.

When your business is ready to invest in marketing, you have a big decision to make: hire someone in-house or work with an agency or contractor.

Both paths have pros and cons and understanding them can help you make a smarter choice for your business goals. This post builds on our previous discussion about hiring strategies and digs deeper into the risks and realities that come with both options.

Benefits of Hiring In-House

• Knowledge Stays Inside: When you hire someone internally, everything they learn about your brand stays with you.
• Dedicated Focus: An in-house hire is working on your business and only your business. They are not juggling multiple clients.
• Full Control: You manage their priorities, tasks, and timelines directly.

Drawbacks of Hiring In-House

• Experience Is Expensive: If you cannot afford a seasoned marketer, you will likely end up hiring young and cheap. That means you are paying to train them.
• Short-Term Stay: Entry-level hires are often looking to build their resumes. They are unlikely to stay long once they find a bigger opportunity.
• Limited Skill Set: A junior marketer may be good at one thing but not skilled across the many areas you likely need help with.
• Time-Consuming Management: You cannot simply hire and forget. A new marketer will need a lot of guidance, coaching, and oversight.
• Additional Costs: Beyond salary, you need to factor in benefits, software, equipment, and the management time you will invest.
• Hidden Costs: While a salary may look cheaper on paper than an agency fee, once you add benefits, taxes, and the lost time spent training and managing, it is often not as cheap as you think.
• The Risk of a Bad Hire: Hiring the wrong person can create major disruption. Ending an employment relationship is much more complicated and riskier than ending a vendor contract.

Benefits of Hiring an Agency or Contractor

• Access to Experience: You tap into a team with diverse skills and real-world marketing experience without paying full-time salaries.
• Breadth of Services: An agency can handle many things at once: strategy, design, content, paid ads, SEO, and more.
• Strategic Insight: Agencies work with multiple industries and client types, giving them broader insight into what works and what does not.
• Turnkey Solution: A good agency becomes your marketing department. You manage outcomes, not the day-to-day operations.
• Scalable Support: Agencies can scale up efforts quickly when needed without you having to make additional hires.
• Easier to End the Relationship: If you hire the wrong agency, ending the contract is usually easier, faster, and less risky than firing an employee. Always be smart and avoid signing long-term contracts upfront until you know the agency delivers on its promises.

Drawbacks of Hiring an Agency or Contractor

• Overpromising Risk: Many agencies are guilty of selling a dream during the pitch and delivering far less once the contract is signed.
• Junior Staff on Your Account: If you are a small client, you might be handed off to their newest or least experienced team members.
• Testing Ground: Some agencies use smaller accounts to test new ideas or tactics before rolling them out to larger clients.
• Less Control: You are trusting an outside partner to execute. Without a strong agreement and clear expectations, you may struggle to get what you want.
• Service Level Variability: Unless you clearly define deliverables, timelines, and accountability measures in your agreement, you may be disappointed in the responsiveness and results.

Final Thoughts

In our earlier post, we recommended that many businesses should start with an agency to build the foundation and then transition to in-house marketing once the business scales. This is still the smartest long-term plan for most.

As a strategy consultant, I believe businesses should ultimately build strong in-house teams whenever possible.

Marketing is the engine that drives growth. You should only outsource to help you grow faster or to cover critical knowledge gaps that do not make sense to hire for internally yet. When you work with a consultant or agency, the goal should be to grow to a point where you can bring that work in-house.

A good consultant or agency will not just deliver results but will help you build the internal systems, strategy, and team you need for sustainable growth. That is what true marketing support looks like: helping you outgrow the need for external support over time.

If you want or need help, because you may not actually want it but know you need it, reach out, we're happy to talk.