There are pros and cons for both. I’m here to inform you of the pitfalls and benefits.
By in-house, it means you hire someone with experience in the field and will work on a full-time basis, or nearly so, at your place of business, although the person could work remotely. In short, they are an employee of your business and you pay them a salary.
The first thing to ask, is there enough work for one person (or more) to have them busy all day, every day?
Not an easy question to answer if you don’t know much about online marketing. You may not even know what you do need. You may think of doing Google Ads but forget about SEO as well as other paid advertising platforms. What about social media? I believe every business should use all of these in their online marketing strategy.
The issue is that one person can’t do all of this, at least not equally well. Therefore, you really need to hire more than one person. That may not be possible for a smaller business.
You could have a hybrid: hire an agency for SEO since, unless you have thousands of pages, you don’t need someone full time. A PPC person could be hired to manage those accounts, but only if there is enough work.
So what is enough work?
At Lucid Web Marketing, we base our fee on the size and scope of a campaign. The size is how many products are we promoting? Is there a turnover of products or is the inventory static? The scope is where are we going to advertise? Yes, Google, but don’t dismiss Bing and there may be other platforms that make sense for your business. And finally how? Google is more than search, it may make sense for you to use display advertising.
All these have to be taken into account. It may be best to consult with an agency such as Lucid Web Marketing to determine what is needed and thus who to hire.
A rule of thumb is, if you make less than one million dollars in yearly revenues, best to go with an agency. Why an agency and not one or two freelancers?
The agency will have resources that can help you. One person cannot know or do all of online marketing well. You will be dealing with say, an SEO person, a PPC person or two and a SMM person. The cost may be the same or lower than one person doing all of these. The pro is that each part of your online marketing strategy will be optimized. That won’t be the case if one person tried to do it all.
So an agency is the best approach for most businesses, small ones in particular.
You may be thinking, why not have current employees do these things? Train them. After all, they already work there, know the business.
I advise against this for many reasons. First an employee, while they may volunteer, may not have the skills to do it. They may not also have the interest to do it, so don’t force doing online marketing of any kind on an employee. What will also likely happen is that they won’t put in as much time and effort into it, thinking their main job to take priority. Indeed, the job they are mainly paid to do is what they are going to do. You cannot let a business critical activity, especially not online marketing, be given to someone without knowledge and experience, much less desire to do it.
What I do recommend however is that each employee think about ways to grow the business. Every employee should be a marketer. That means getting on social media and talk about what they are experts at. Every employee should be trained on how to do this properly and some time, say 15 to 30 minutes per day, set aside as part of their duties.
Decided to hire an agency? Schedule a call with Lucid Web Marketing to discuss your needs.