Finding, hiring and training the right marketing team is a huge undertaking. It takes a team of 6-7 qualified specialists. Mike and Bob discuss how to increase ROI when hiring an outside marketing agency.

Debbie: What are some factors to consider when hiring in house teams? To bring everybody in- house and hire a whole marketing team versus working with an outside expert or agency for all your digital marketing initiatives?

Mike: Yeah, from my personal experience, you know, I had a choice to make. Do I work with outside experts or do I start building a team? A couple of things came into play. One is timing. How long does it take to get a team up and running to find the right people, the right talent, train them, so hopefully they know what they’re doing? You’re going to have some turnover and you’re going to have to manage this new team and put it together and hopefully, it works out right? So you’re kind of hoping that the skills that you hire the right ones to drive your business forward.

The other thing is cost. So I had to weigh what does it cost of doing it internally versus externally and internally. I’ve got to hire full-time employees that I have to keep on the books for years. And hopefully that the return on investment is there. Also, there’s risks with bringing five, six people on board with no structured marketing program in place. So that’s what I looked at. In the in the external piece, again, you do have some risks. Is the group going to fit within your organizational culture? So that’s something important. Will the expert fit into our culture?

When we reached out to Bob. It was, you know, will you be able to assimilate to our team and understand what we do? And we went through the process of looking at a four or five, six different companies and one of the primary differences, what I saw some of the non-boutique but agency models, I had to weigh, are they really going to be there for me and help me day in and day out or are they going to give me their model and say this is what we’re doing–we don’t care what you think. And what I found is that seemed to be the agency model.

The other model I saw was there are lots of freelancers that are very good at what they do, but they were very specific skillset. So I said, oh my gosh, I’m going to have to hire an external team. If I don’t want to take the risk internally, but then I’m going to need four or five different companies that specialize in different pieces of the digital marketing space. So those are some of the things that I looked at when evaluating it. So it was risk, cost, speed.