What are the pros and cons of inhousing your marketing?

Performance Marketing
Optimisation/Conversion
Online Advertising
Inbound Marketing
Digital Strategy
Digital Full Service
Content Strategy/Creation
Content Marketing

As we all adapt to this ‘new normal’ way of working and re-evaluate our strategies, is now the time to review how you manage your digital marketing? Should you bring your marketing inhouse?

We recently held an expert panel debate on this topic and our host, Diane Young, CEO & Co-Founder of The Drum asked Don Williams, Retail Partner at KPMG, Minter Dial, Global Marketing Specialist and Modo25's CEO John Readman for their views on what they think are the pros and cons of inhousing.

What are the pros of inhousing?

As the Managing Director at L’Oréal for nearly two decades, Minter Dial has experienced an inhouse team and outsourced to an agency. He believes that communication with your audience is crucial and when creating a strong brand voice, he asks: “How can an agency replicate your voice? These are often spontaneous conversations with your customers - you need to seriously be considering this as a real arm of your CRM.”

With over 25 years’ experience in retail, Don Williams agrees on that an inhouse team allows brands to own their voice and to fully understand their customers.

At Modo25, we believe in empowering teams, enabling them to take their marketing inhouse and take control of their own success; CEO and Founder John Readman addresses how this control allows you to connect with your audience: “If you genuinely want to put the customer at the heart of your organisation, the ability to communicate as an authentic brand is really important.”

John says that this control spans further than your customers and means you have more understanding when it comes to your budgets and performance metrics. He believes that by inhousing your data and a team to track your performance, enables transparency and clarity – especially when working with a conglomerate such as Google or Amazon.

What are the cons of inhousing?

Don questions whether you would have the depth of expertise and skills inhouse in relation to the cost, compared to an agency. He says that digital specialists are variable costs to the business and if an old-fashioned business would be as creative: “How do you build digital capability around your boardroom table to effectively manage an inhouse team and drive it in the right direction?”

Following on from Don’s comments, Minter elaborates on ‘digital savviness’ in the boardroom, which can hinder these creative teams. He says that you need to show personality in your brand voice through communications and that inhouse teams are generally quite dry and won’t say anything controversial. Minter also talks about the challenge of boardroom directors managing these creative specialists.

John thinks that the struggle with inhousing boils down to recruitment and how you attract the right people, particularly competing against an agency, with the ‘beers and pool table’. He also addresses the practicalities of a smaller team and what happens when a team member is off sick or on holiday: “An agency has a breadth of people who can do the same thing, so there is definitely a need for some level of back up and support if you are a smaller team trying to inhouse.”

Modo25 are a supported inhousing specialist, unlike an agency – we don’t manage every aspect of your marketing. With our continued guidance and support, we want to help your inhouse team to upskill and expand. If you are thinking about inhousing your digital marketing and not sure where to start, we’d love to help! Feel free to send us an email to team@modo25.com