Not surprisingly, marketing departments in cutting-edge companies are beginning to build their own online marketing staff rather than partnering with ad agencies for all of their marketing campaign needs. Keeping online marketing in-house lowers labor costs, speeds up campaign execution, and maintains consistency. Yet, why are some corporate marketing departments continuing to rely on outside vendors, like ad agencies, when they'd be better served by an in-house staff?



While using an ad agency is an important and necessary function of your marketing strategy, it should not be the only solution to creating and launching effective campaigns. If an ad agency is hired to execute your online strategy, it is likely causing multiple problems you may not have considered. 

Since ad agencies typically work off-site, the speed at which your marketing department can work is hampered. You can't just walk down the hall and get a few questions answered by a team member. Instead, you type an email to your ad agency contact, click send, and wait. Or you call and leave a message on their voicemail. You may get an answer in 24 minutes or 24 hours. Waiting for feedback and answers from the ad agency team hinders your ability to test and retest online ads, copy, and content; slowing down all the processes of the campaigns in your marketing department. While this may seem like a minor inconvenience, if your competitors are speeding past you, your marketing results are crippled before your campaign even begins.

Another factor to consider is that with ad agencies, you introduce a new type of competition—with your own company! One crucial component to your marketing strategy is targeted keywords for your campaigns. What happens when these valuable keywords are being sought after by your internal marketing staff, your business-to-business ad agency, and your business-to-consumer ad agency? That's right—your company's cost for these keywords goes through the roof unnecessarily!

Online ad buys are more expensive too. Ad agencies, just like everyone else, need to make a profit. One way they accomplish this is by marking up your online ad buys. Bringing this function in-house can save a minimum of 15% - possibly much more.

Perhaps the single most important reason to bring online marketing in-house is so that you have complete control over your digital brand. Seamless branding is a must in today's marketplace. You, of course, want to have brand guidelines for your online marketing just as you do in your offline marketing, but even with them, if you have an outside ad agency (or more than one) working on your online marketing, are they going to match what you're doing exactly or even what each other is doing? Your digital branding is just too important to outsource to people not as familiar with your company's vision and branding strategy.

Rather than using outside ad agencies to work on your online marketing campaigns, create your own marketing staff by building a quality team, this can be accomplished on a contract, contract-to-hire or direct placement basis. It will speed up your response time, save you money and enable you to produce a consistent quality campaign—blowing your competition out of the water.