How a Marketing Agency Can Improve Your In-House Team

A digital marketing agency can take your in-house team to the next level — here’s how.

Here, you’ll find:

• How agencies improve in-house marketing teams
• The added benefits agencies bring with them
• Ways agencies can foster cross-team collaboration
• How agencies can help your programs improve faster

Whether you’re a one-person marketing master or have dozens of colleagues on your team, managing a digital marketing program is a multi-faceted job. From paid search campaigns and optimization to content creation and everything in between, it can feel like you’re balancing several plates at once.

That’s where partnering with an agency comes in. A digital marketing agency can help you keep those plates balanced. Not only that, but they can juggle other aspects you hadn’t even thought about. 

Here are 7 main ways agencies and in-house marketing teams can come together to produce results greater than the sum of their parts.

1. A broader view of your program

There’s a lot to be said for seeing both the forest and the trees. Seeing the big picture without letting details slip through the cracks is an underrated skill. Many marketing agencies know this well. 

One of the biggest benefits of partnering with an agency is how it offers a broader view of your program as a whole, including its strengths and weaknesses.

It makes sense: when you’re part of an in-house marketing team, it’s easy to get caught up in your day-to-day digital marketing efforts. Agencies offer an outsider perspective and can address blind spots you didn’t know existed.

Partnering with an agency often means you have access to a whole additional team of marketing pros. (Image via Unsplash)

2. Combined years of marketing industry experience

Add up the years of experience your team members have. By working with an agency, you can instantly double or even triple that number — pretty appealing, right? 

Partnering with an agency often means you have access to a whole additional team of marketing pros. Depending on the company, some of your account managers may have worked in the industry for several years in different roles across various industries to boot. 

By combining your knowledgeable team with another set of marketing experts, you’ve got that much more experience that will no doubt come in handy, especially when changes arise and tough decisions need to be made.

3. Insider access to the top platforms

Oftentimes, agencies have developed partnerships with professionals at different platforms, from Google and Bing to Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. 

Not only do these partnerships help potentially expedite issues when troubleshooting or connecting with customer service reps, but they can also keep you ahead of the game when it comes to platform updates and news. 

And since agencies generally have higher management status with the likes of search engine brands, they can often get access to beta testing before other companies. This means they’re sometimes testing out new automation and algorithms that could help your business down the road.

4. Less time spent experimenting and testing

You should always be honing your digital marketing strategy. Not only does that take time, but it involves brainstorming, testing, data gathering, and analyzing, among other tasks.

An agency can benefit your in-house team because they’ve been there. Depending on how many clients they’ve worked with, they’ve likely got the experience that will help fine-tune and iterate your program faster. 

What this means for you: less time spent on what isn’t working, and more time on what is. 

5. Keeping an eye on your competitors

Remember that tunnel vision we talked about? While you may not want to admit it, it’s easy for this to happen when it comes to your competitors, too. It’s understandable: you’re trying to make things happen for your company, so you don’t want to spend too much time looking at others.

But knowing what your competitors are up to helps you stay in the game and, more importantly, not fall behind. A good agency can keep an eye on your competition, from the keywords they’re bidding on and the content they’re creating to approaches you could adopt in your own way for success.

Whereas a consultant is often one person, agencies may have 3-4 people working on your account. (Image by Unsplash)

6. A new set of resources

If your business is trying to decide whether to partner with a consultant or an agency, resources are another big differentiator. Whereas a consultant is often one person, agencies may have 3-4 people working on your account.

Agencies often come with experts in fields like search engine optimization and search engine marketing. But many also have on-staff developers, graphic designers, and content writers you can also leverage. Think of it more like a one-stop shop vs. a one-person show.

7. Connecting marketing to other teams

Your marketing team isn’t the only group that stands to benefit from an agency partnership. It can also help align other departments in your organization, resulting in better communication and a more streamlined process overall.

By implementing lead scoring, for example, an agency can create a more unified relationship between sales and marketing by putting more emphasis on the quality of a conversion. Or by putting cleaner data into your CRM, you can give your e-commerce or fulfillment teams a better understanding of order volumes to prepare for in the future.  

The takeaway

Partnering with a marketing agency doesn’t mean your in-house team has failed or isn’t up to snuff. Actually, the opposite is true. 

By adding the additional layer of knowledge, insight, and hands-on action that agencies provide, you can see a significant boost in how your current SEM and SEO programs perform. 

HawkSEM would love to be that game-changing agency for you — want to know more? Let’s chat.

This article has been updated and was originally published in October 2019.