Life as an internal marketer is an interesting one. You’re generally stuck somewhere between your audience and your company’s executive team — with neither side really caring about your day-to-day.
Your audience wants on-brand, valuable content across the various channels you’ve made a name on. Your executive team wants to know what you even need a marketing budget for, and also, can you please boost a post tomorrow?
Jokes aside, most internal marketers (especially those without their own teams) do need an agency to roll out the big, bold plans they have for growth.
Internal marketers are often expected to:
- Run SEO
- Manage Meta and Google Ads
- Oversee website
- Handle email
- Produce content
- Report to leadership
- Align with sales
- Track performance
- And, somehow, “grow revenue”
It’s where a digital marketing agency comes in clutch.
- Internal marketers are often juggling a bit of everything, which makes it hard to execute every channel properly and consistently.
- Agencies don’t replace you, they give you the extra hands and specialist support to actually bring your ideas to life.
- Knowing what needs to be done is one thing, having the time to do it well is another.
- Bringing in an agency is usually about building momentum and taking some of the pressure off, especially when you’re trying to grow.
- The real question isn’t “do we need an agency?”, it’s whether your current setup can actually deliver the results you’re aiming for.
Internal marketers often hesitate to bring in an agency
a) The fear of being replaced
“If they can do it better, what does that say about me?”
Your job should be the strategy, not the minutia of every aspect of execution. We’d hope our dedicated SEO specialists are better than you at SEO (no offence).
b) Loss of control
c) Bad past experiences
You may have used agencies in the past and experienced burnt budgets, a bunch of vanity metrics in your monthly reports, or the dreaded complete lack of transparency.
It’s obvious we’ll say this, but we mean it: most agencies aren’t like that.
d) Budget politics
The classic, “Couldn’t we just hire another junior?”
You could, but generally speaking, an agency will get you more bang for your buck. And by that, I mean more experience and specialist knowledge for your marketing dollar.
e) Time cost of managing an agency
There will be more meetings and more time spent on approvals. But also, a lot less time fumbling around in the backend and googling, “What even is robots.txt?”
Agencies can’t replace you. But they can amplify you.
a) Depth vs breadth
You’re a marketing manager. You have to be a bit of a generalist, just by necessity. As an agency, we have access to specialists in every area. It means we have depth and runs on the board in every channel. We have deep platform-level expertise. Our breadth of clients means when issues come up, we’ve probably already seen and solved it before.
b) Execution capacity
There is a huge difference between knowing what you need to do and being able to do the doing.
You may know you need:
- 4 SEO articles/month
- Technical audits
- CRO testing
- Creative refreshes for Meta
- Conversion tracking optimisation
c) Risk mitigation
Agencies take a lot of the risk out of it for you.
First of all, whether you’re tinkering to optimise for search or you’re in Meta Ads Manager, there is inherent risk. Websites break. Meta Ads is linked to the company credit card.
In an agency, specialists are taught to have a healthy amount of paranoia. Ie. Triple-check you aren’t spending the client’s money. Or, test the website when you’re done to make sure you didn’t break it.
And if we do break it, we’re onto the support team, and they’re fixing it ASAP.
It takes a lot of the risk out of the technical stuff for you.
And with specialists across all these channels, we know when the big stuff is happening. Like Meta launching Andromeda or Google running another core update.
When agency support makes the most sense
Agency support makes the most sense when you’re ready to grow or expand your marketing. If SEO becomes a priority (and you have no idea how to do that). Or you’re ready to take on a new channel, like TikTok Advertising.
Sometimes, a change in performance might call for further support. Maybe your marketing performance has plateaued or your leadership team is keen to see more sophistication in your strategy. That’s when it makes sense to bring in external help.
How to justify agency support internally
It can be hard to be sat in the marketing seat of your company and be the one pitching to an agency.
Here is how you can justify it to your leadership team.
Step 1: Position it as leverage, not outsourcing
Make it clear that a marketing agency doesn’t replace your internal strategy but rather provides deeper channel expertise to help you expand.
Step 2: Quantify the opportunity cost
Take them through the time commitment for creating momentum with SEO or the hands-on time required to test creative.
The speed an agency can provide gives your marketing team a competitive advantage against your competitors.
Step 3: Compare against hiring
Step 4: Define the boundaries
When you find an agency that you think might be a good fit, make sure you’re open with them from the beginning. A good agency will be open to working with you, allowing you to drive the overarching strategy and keep your hands on the brand control.
They’ll be open with you about the standards for reporting and the KPIs they’re able to work towards and report on.
What a healthy agency–internal relationship actually looks like
Most agencies don’t want to be your brand manager, strategy director, and in-built messenger all in one.
The typical breakdown looks a bit like this:
You own:
- Brand
- Strategy
- Commercial direction
- Stakeholder communication
We own:
- Channel execution
- Testing
- Technical optimisation
- Tactical iteration
Red flags to avoid if you’re ready to take the leap
So, you’ve decided hiring a marketing agency might be the go for your business. How do you avoid the horror stories?
These are the red flags we’d avoid if we were you.
Long lock-in contracts
No access to ad accounts
You should always have access to your ad accounts. We’d go a step further and say you should have ownership over your own accounts. Your agency may be the default owner if they set your account up for you, but you getting that same access should never be a drama.
And if the account already exists, they certainly should never have to make a new account that you don’t have access to in order to do their job.
Reporting on fluff metrics
Overpromising rankings or ROAS
An SEO agency should be able to give you a time estimate on how long it might take you to rank for a certain type of keyword. But they’ll generally give you a bunch of caveats and “it depends” statements. That isn’t a lack of confidence, it’s an abundance of caution.
If you’re talking to a few agencies and one agency is promising results that the other agencies are a bit unsure of, they may be a bit of a red flag.
The real question isn’t “Do we need an agency?”
It’s:
Can we realistically achieve our growth targets with the current internal capacity and depth of knowledge we have of our existing channels?
That’s a bit wordy, but it’s important to remember that your marketing agency exists to become an extension of your team.
We’re here to take you from good to great — not replace the marketing managers.
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Think we might be a good fit? We’d love to chat with you.
