Wasting $10,000 a Month? In-house Marketing Mistakes

Are you wasting up to $10,000 a month with these in-house marketing mistakes? Have you considered alternatives to doing all the marketing for your small business in-house? You can continue doing marketing in-house or choose to outsource all your marketing to an agency. You can even choose a hybrid model where you continue to do some of your marketing in-house, while outsourcing other marketing functions to the professionals. Today, we’ll discuss the trade-offs you must consider in making that decision to avoid in-house marketing mistakes.

Some small businesses overlook the impact of marketing on their success, focusing instead on securing financing or struggling with necessary day-to-day operations. Well, that’s a mistake. Marketing is the ONLY way to bring free money into your business—money that helps pay the bills and supports expansion. Yet, there are ways to do marketing better, as we’ll discuss below.

A lot goes into the decision about how to manage your marketing, including industry, target market, financial resources, goals, and many other factors unique to your business. The only deadly mistake is assuming you don’t need to consider marketing when running a small business. Next, you face a plethora of strategic decisions about how to proceed with your marketing function, which involves more factors you must weigh in making your decision. This site seeks to help you plan and execute your marketing function so you can succeed (search for specific topics or choose categories, such as Marketing Strategy for solutions).

Today’s topic considers who should do your marketing, so read on! While I benefit when companies choose an agency, since I offer a host of services, such as coaching and content marketing, I’ll attempt to objectively present the trade-offs so you can make an informed decision that benefits your business.

The illustration above points to one of the biggest in-house marketing mistakes: assuming that doing your marketing in-house is cheaper than hiring an agency.

Avoiding costly in-house marketing mistakes

Here are the benefits of doing your marketing in-house (we’ll expand on these in subsequent sections):

1. Your brand voice shines through with authenticity
2. You improve your ability to respond quickly, in real-time
3. Better control and accountability for results
4. You own your data and assets

Drawbacks to in-house marketing:

1. Marketing today requires a diverse, highly specific skill set 
2. Tech costs a bundle
3. Your posts can begin to seem monotone after months or years of being written by the same team or they might fail to appreciate marketing opportunities
4. Vulnerability to turnover and inability to scale quickly

Benefits of in-house marketing

Avoiding in-house marketing mistakes isn’t a simple task. However, don’t immediately assume that in-house marketing is always the right answer. You must objectively and carefully consider your ability and the advantages of doing your own marketing when choosing that option. Here’s a deeper dive on those advantages:

1. Sustainable brand voice (brand identity)

It’s critical for your success to engage your community with the content you produce in a world dominated by digital rather than traditional media. Doing that isn’t an easy task, but posting authentic, valuable content that positions your brand positively in the eyes of your target market on a consistent basis is one pillar of that success. By maintaining your own marketing activities, you can help ensure your voice rings true.

With a consistent brand voice, you ensure your value proposition comes through loud and clear, rather than muddled, which can confuse your target market. Because an in-house team has up-to-date information about your products and interacts on a daily basis with your sales and customer service teams, you ensure your brand message hits home for your market.

2. Agile, real-time response

Another in-house marketing mistake is tying the hands of your marketing folks with long, drawn-out updates on what’s happening in the company. Having intimate knowledge of customer issues, feedback, and product changes allows in-house marketers to respond quickly when something arises. Of course, that only happens if you don’t hamper your marketing folks by forcing them through a bureaucratic process before posting content or interacting with a customer.

Sure, you need a process in place to avoid disasters caused when unsupervised marketers post inappropriate content while representing your brand. For instance, something like this post can cause long-term damage to your reputation. Hence, you need to balance independence with guardrails.

Similarly, based on current analytics, an in-house team can quickly pivot a campaign to improve performance. Your messaging is always not only on brand, but you can run a flash promotion if needed or respond to a customer complaint. The faster you deal with these, the less damaging they are to your reputation. With an agency, your attempt to address a customer concern may get bogged down behind a queue of other tasks.

3. Accountability

While it’s possible to tie an agency’s compensation to its performance, it’s much easier and more transparent when your employees are in charge of marketing. Similarly, an agency is often forced to balance multiple clients’ needs. If you run a small business, that might mean your needs take a back seat to a bigger, more important client.

In terms of control, we already discussed that an in-house marketing mistake is not instituting any form of control. But you might lack the same level of control with an outside agency, where they often work semi-autonomously based on your overarching tactical discussions

4. Ownership of data and assets

You can avoid in-house marketing mistakes by hiring an agency to manage your marketing. However, you must clearly spell out ownership of assets. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve taken on a client that didn’t own their domain or hosting, maybe even their social media or email subscriber lists. Instead, the agency controls these critical assets by not sharing the passwords you need to access them. The same goes for your visual assets and files.

Data has value in the current environment. Unless you have access to all your data in real time, you can’t make informed decisions that help your business succeed. Plus, when an agency has access to your data, you may not know whether you can trust the reports they prepare for you or who else they’re sharing your proprietary data with.

Avoiding in-house marketing mistakes by using an agency

We’ve discussed some of the advantages of using an in-house marketing team, but there’s a lot to be said in favor of hiring an agency. First, it helps you avoid in-house marketing mistakes. Beyond that and the prospect of lower overall costs, there are other reasons for hiring an agency. Here are just a few:

1. They are skilled in marketing

In the past, you might have survived with an in-house marketing team that h with an in-house marketing team that had rudimentary skills, such as copywriting, graphic design, and advertising. Today’s marketing environment requires a whole list of technical skills that aren’t easy or cheap to find. Below are some of the skills in high demand.

Notice the relative unimportance of traditional marketing skills, such as advertising and creativity, compared to the more critical and hard-to-find technical skills needed to succeed in marketing today.

One of the top in-house marketing mistakes is settling for a couple of generalists and expecting the same results you might find from highly trained, technically savvy (and expensive) folks who know how to do:

• SEO/GEO
• Data analytics
• Paid media management, which shares little with traditional advertising
• Digital graphic design and video editing
• CRM
• Software skills with today’s tools, such as marketing automation, email marketing, and data analytics

2. Tech costs

Another of the big in-house marketing mistakes is going it without the right tools in your tech stack. And marketing software is expensive and getting more so every year. You need tech tools that can cost thousands of dollars per month (the way SaaS products are sold) for SEO audits, CRM and marketing automation, heatmapping, and analytics. Because an agency distributes these high costs across a number of clients, you’re only paying a small portion of the monthly costs.

Typical small business marketing stack: SEO & competitive research (Semrush/Ahrefs: ~$130–$250/mo), Email/Marketing Automation ($100–$300/mo), Creative Suite (Adobe/Canva: ~$60–$90/mo), Social Scheduling & Analytics ($50–$150/mo), and Heatmapping/Conversion tracking ($50–$100/mo).

3. Working in an echo chamber

Another of the in-house marketing mistakes you can make is your content becoming an echo chamber where your team gets stale. Their content looks the same, their design is uninspired, and even their strategies seem carbon-copied.

Similarly, because agencies work with multiple clients in many different industries and markets, they gain insights, have access to benchmark data, and approach your needs with a fresh creative approach and strategy.

4. Scalability is easier

As your business grows, you need to scale your efforts. One of the big in-house marketing mistakes is not planning sufficiently to hire, train, and onboard additional staff before you need to scale your marketing beyond your current needs. Similarly, turnover represents a similar need to replace existing staff with new staff. You also experience a lag as your replacements gain expertise in your specific strategies and get up to speed.

In-house marketing mistakes and agency advantages

Here’s a quick table highlighting our discussion of the pros and cons of relying on an in-house marketing team with the associated costs for each option.

Of course, your marketing doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing decision. You might decide to keep some marketing tasks in-house, while outsourcing some tasks to an agency. This is the best of both worlds, as you can use an agency for tasks where you don’t have expertise, such as digital advertising, while keeping other tasks in-house, such as content creation. This also allows you to scale effortlessly, as you can assign more tasks to the agency (already familiar with your brand and people) as your business grows. You can slowly take back some of these task as your needs change based on adding new staff.

That’s why I’ve structured my services the way I have. You can choose a full-service option, where my team does everything for you, from building strategy with your team, SEO/GEO, content marketing, analyzing conversion and other metrics, advertising, and even website design. You can add à la carte options to enhance this option to suit your needs.

If you’re more comfortable with an in-house team, I offer one-on-one and small group coaching.

I offer a choice of options for those who prefer a hybrid option, from content marketing, e-commerce optimization, and digital advertising, to name a few.

Conclusion

There are a bunch of in-house marketing mistakes just waiting for the unwary. These mistakes might waste your money, strain your resources, result in damage to your reputation, and/or cost you valuable opportunities to grow your business. By weighing your options with the information on the pros and cons of in-house marketing against the opportunities offered when you hire an agency, you’re in the best position to succeed.

Below is a summary of these pros and cons to help you avoid in-house marketing mistakes. 

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Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our affordable coaching programs to help your business thrive into the future.