Why digital marketing should be done in-house

Digital marketing is fundamental for every business, but hiring a full-time in-house team of digital marketers can be expensive. Large corporations have the budget for that, but small and medium-sized businesses might not be able to cover a full team and instead, use outsourced services.

Outsourced digital marketing has gotten a bad rap over the years, and it’s not all fair.

In fact, there are many benefits to hiring an external marketing team. It’s usually cheaper, and you can get access to a wide variety of talent spread out across the world. However, there are also several drawbacks that make in-house marketing teams superior.

If you’ve been thinking about outsourcing your digital marketing needs, or you’ve been trying to come up with a good reason to hire an in-house team, here’s why digital marketing is better executed in-house.

Faster turnaround times

When your marketing duties are executed by your in-house team, they’ll prioritise tasks based on your marketing plan. If they get bogged down, you can still outsource individual tasks to an agency or freelancer, but you never have to worry about a third-party agency postponing your needs because they have other clients to manage.

Keeping things in-house is something many industries do, even fleet maintenance is done in-house to avoid the markups and slow turnaround from relying on repair shops.

In-house teams know your products or services better

Knowing your market is the heart of success, but you also need to know your products or services inside and out to sell them to your market.

For example, say you sell a coffee maker that can control how much water you use for the brew cycle, even if the reserve tank is full. This feature might not seem important overall, but if you’re marketing to baristas or people who are serious about their coffee, this feature could be what gets them to buy your coffee maker over others.

If you hand your digital marketing duties to an outsourced team, they might not even realise your coffee maker has a feature to control the amount of water used during the brewing cycle. And unless they have experience in the coffee industry, they wouldn’t even know why this would be important.

The bottom line is that an external team won’t be completely familiar with your product even after you brief them. Your team knows your products better than anyone, and when you have an in-house team, they’ll catch all the nuances that others leave behind.

Outsourcing to improve efficiency might be a myth

Many businesses say they outsource digital marketing to improve efficiency, but it’s worth considering that outsourcing might actually make you less efficient. For example, you’ll have to spend a lot of time upfront defining your business goals and making sure the company you’ve chosen is reliable and has the proper experience.

Ammar Tarique is a business journalist.

• KT Network