It’s a common misconception when it comes to investing in marketing that you need to choose between an in-house marketing team or hiring an external marketing agency.

And as a marketing agency, you’d be forgiven for thinking that we would use this opportunity to knock in-house teams and advocate for solely using an agency.

But in this case, you’d be mistaken! It can be of great benefit for agencies to step in to assist – not replace – your internal teams. For many organisations, this combination is often the best way to get the most out of your marketing campaigns, alleviate internal pressures, and deliver incredible ROI.

How does this work?

For larger businesses, the sheer volume of day-to-day marketing requirements means that in-house marketing teams are a necessity. But even then, you will likely encounter a situation where having the additional resource and expertise of a specialist marketing agency is advantageous.

For example, you may be looking to launch a new product or service to market as quickly as possible, and you need to educate and market to internal stakeholders and your partners, before working with them to promote to your target customers.

Or you may be looking to run a full, six-month marketing programme with your partners to a specific target audience.

In both of these examples, bringing a marketing agency on board would enhance your internal marketing teams, ensuring success and making your brand even stronger. Here’s a few reasons why:

Boost your expertise

You might have some incredibly talented employees in your marketing team – but even they can’t be experts at everything (and they can’t be everywhere at once!).

Agencies can help complement and boost the skills your team already has. They likely work with dozens of businesses, and often specialise in certain industries. This means they will have almost certainly worked with a company that’s facing the same challenges or is in the same situation as your own.

This knowledge can be invaluable for in-house teams, offering insight into the latest trends, upcoming legislation in that industry, and what marketing tactics tend to perform best for that industry. They can also help advise on the best language and messaging to use for that specific target audience.

Likewise, your in-house team will have insights your agency would appreciate too, such as experience gained from previous marketing initiatives.

Scalability

Upcoming large projects, a campaign, or a multi-partner event – whatever the situation is, you may suddenly find that your in-house team is being pulled a million different ways, and there’s simply too much work for that team to be able to deal with.

Working with an agency allows you to scale up and down when needed and execute to drive results, boosting your resources with an experienced partner marketing team.

Managing partners

Working with multiple partners, each of whom having their own internal processes, budgets, and requirements, can be time-consuming and tricky to manage.

A marketing agency that specialises in partner management can create structure to your partner marketing programmes or standalone activity. Following that, they can work with each partner and ensure that any integrated and joint activity runs smoothly, taking those tasks away from clients and in-house teams. The agency can then keep the teams updated with the latest updates and results from the partner’s activities, so they have an overview of progress.

By taking that weight off you, it’s giving your teams time to focus, whilst making all sides feel valued – solidifying your relationship with your partners.

Better measurement

We all know that measuring the success of your marketing campaigns is critical – and for marketing agencies, it’s part and parcel of everything they do.

With large organisations, there are multiple sources to pull data from – perhaps both regional and global teams are involved, multiple different partners, and various different data platforms.

A marketing agency can work with the various internal teams, pulling together the different parts of this complex jigsaw to get higher quality, more insightful measurements and therefore increase the likelihood of success.

Quicker time to market

Need to move quickly on a project? With the additional boost of an agency to your team, bringing in their range of skills, knowledge experience, the time to market can be dramatically reduced – without negatively impacting the quality of the campaign assets or delivery.

Fresh perspective

Your in-house team will likely know your organisation inside out, and that knowledge is a great strength. However, tunnel vision can also set in – for example, they may solely use set tactics that have worked on previous campaigns and shunning those tactics that perhaps didn’t work as well before.

Bringing a marketing agency on board means you can bring a fresh and impartial perspective. By taking that step back and being completely removed from whatever is happening internally at your organisation, an agency can bring new ideas, different ways or thinking and advice to make the most out your efforts.

Conclusion

Your brand can be made even stronger through collaboration. If your internal teams are feeling the pinch, it’s worth exploring marketing agencies and to see what options are available for you. Agencies can help out – either to assist in one single element – such as creating a value proposition or a go-to-market plan (GTM), or across a full programme of activity.

By working together – assisting, not replacing – amazing results can be achieved, helping to make key stakeholders look like superheroes!

Get in touch to find out how the Coterie team can help. Give us a call on 0113 292 0945 or email us at [email protected]

Written by: Elizabeth Johnson, Partner Marketing Lead, Coterie