In-House Marketing vs. Agency Teams: Build a Strong Strategy Together

February 28th, 2025 by Paula Keller French

This post was updated by Paula French on 2/28/25 to reflect recent trends and best practice. It was originally published on 12/6/2018.

Key Insights

• As brands grow, marketing demands increase, making it difficult for internal teams to execute strategy, create content, analyze performance, and keep up with industry shifts all at once.
• Agencies provide specialized expertise and resources that complement in-house efforts, allowing internal teams to focus on core business priorities and guide overall strategy.
• Combining internal marketing strengths with agency support creates a scalable, results-driven strategy that adapts to changing needs without overloading your team.

Internal marketing teams are often expected to manage it all — strategy, execution, and analysis — on top of keeping up with regular day-to-day tasks. But as the workload grows, so does the risk of burnout, missed priorities and deadlines, and campaigns that don’t perform as expected. The faster the industry evolves, the harder it is for stretched-thin teams to keep up, leading to outdated strategies and missed opportunities.

While outsourcing can help lighten the internal load, some in-house teams hesitate to seek out agency support, fearing they’ll lose control over their marketing strategy. In reality, internal teams and agencies don’t have to compete. They can leverage their respective strengths to create an agile, focused, and impactful marketing approach.

If you’re deciding between keeping all of your marketing in-house or partnering with an agency, here’s why you don’t have to choose just one, plus how to balance both for the best results.

How Can an Agency Help Me If I Am a…

Single-person marketing team

Instead of feeling like a one-person show, you’ll have a team to bounce ideas off, refine strategies, and make sure nothing slips through the cracks while improving your results.

Single-person marketing “teams” can feel isolated and underappreciated. Your organization’s leaders expect you to handle it on your own, but as you’ve tried to run campaigns, manage vendors, write content, plan the strategy, update your website, and still get results, you find two challenges:

1. There isn’t enough time to do it all yourself.
2. One person rarely has the skills to be strategic, create graphics, update a website, monitor results, and evaluate and manage vendors.

A marketing agency takes the weight off your shoulders by acting as an extension of your team. They bring the time, skills, and experience to tackle everything from strategy planning to execution and performance tracking, so you’re not stuck doing it alone.

Business leader

No more juggling ads, content, and campaigns on the fly. Partnering with an agency ensures your marketing is always working, even when you’re too busy to think about it.

When you’re responsible for driving the business forward, marketing is just one of many things competing for your time. Whether you’re managing it all yourself or working with local media vendors, it can be difficult to stay strategic and aligned with your goals.

You may often feel that:

1. Marketing takes a back seat when business operations call for urgent attention.
2. You got into your field to do what you love, not market what you love.
3. You are reacting to promotional ideas as they cross your desk, with no real strategy about how to best reach your customers.

Being a leader means wearing many hats, and marketing often ends up as an afterthought. An agency helps shift it from a scattered, reactionary task to a well-planned strategy that actually supports your growth.

Medium-to-large marketing team

Even with a well-staffed, in-house department, keeping up with every aspect of marketing can be a challenge. Between aligning team members, executing campaigns, and adapting to industry updates, it’s easy to get stuck in the weeds and lose valuable time for strategy. You may find that:

1. Your internal marketing team needs support in strategy and direction.
2. The time it takes to execute tactics gets in the way of strategically analyzing what is truly working (and what is not).
3. You struggle to keep up with new and changing marketing technologies and ideas.

Partnering with a marketing agency helps bridge these gaps by bringing fresh insights, specialized expertise, and extra hands where you need them most.  Whether it’s adjusting your strategy, handling time-consuming execution, or keeping your team ahead of evolving trends, they’ll keep your marketing in check and on track without overloading your internal resources.

Higher education marketer

Instead of constantly shifting from one urgent task to the next, an agency’s support helps you be more intentional with your marketing.

Higher education marketing is a constant balancing act. One minute you’re fine-tuning messaging for a new degree program, the next you’re trying to boost student engagement — all while keeping an eye on enrollment goals. With so many priorities commanding your attention, it’s easy to feel like you’re always in reactive mode and that:

1. Your marketing efforts are spread too thin. You’re trying to serve prospective students, current students, and alumni all at once while balancing multiple degrees and programs.
2. Data analysis and performance reporting fall by the wayside due to time constraints.
3. Meeting ambitious enrollment goals feels unattainable without additional resources or expertise.

An agency will take on recruitment and retention efforts, ensuring you reach the right students at the right time. With deeper data insights, you’ll make informed strategic decisions, focusing your time and budget on what drives real results.

Want to find out if partnering with an agency is right for your institution? Take our Higher Ed SEO Quiz to discover your best staffing approach based on your current resources, strategy, and performance.

In-House Marketing vs. Agency Partnerships

Balancing in-house marketing with agency support lets you stay involved while tapping into advanced expertise. Your team knows your brand best, while an agency brings the skills, strategy, and execution power to amplify your efforts.

At Search Influence, many of our clients handle routine tasks internally while relying on us for more strategic, high-impact initiatives. The key is knowing which responsibilities are best handled by your in-house team and which most benefit from external support.

What work should my in-house marketing team handle?

Identifying unique stories that can be included in marketing

Great marketing starts with great stories, but you can’t share what you don’t know.

As part of your internal tasks, build relationships with departments and stakeholders across your organization. This ensures you stay informed of exciting news and developments that bring your marketing to life.

For example, let’s say you are marketing for a university, and one of your instructors learns that one of her students won a research award. Would your marketing team hear about it?

If you educate your staff on your marketing goals and build vital relationships, you’ll be less likely to miss valuable stories that strengthen your outreach.

Serving as spokespeople for public relations and media opportunities

Having the right people represent your organization in the media bolsters your brand’s credibility and reach. Instead of scrambling when a press opportunity arises, establish a roster of internal experts who can confidently speak on key topics.

Identifying multiple spokespeople prevents over-reliance on a single person, speeds up media responses, and ensures you always have a knowledgeable representative prepared to engage with the public.

By designating these spokespeople internally, you streamline the process and create a sense of ownership within your team. When staff members are prepared and empowered to speak on behalf of the organization, it fosters consistent messaging and a proactive approach to media inquiries.

Creating day-to-day organic social posts

Social media is where you build a genuine connection with your audience, and staying consistent is what’s key to maintaining that bond. Hubspot reports that social media is the preferred means for product discovery among consumers aged 18 to 44, making routine posting all the more important.

For businesses with the right in-house resources, managing daily posts can be straightforward. But when time or expertise is limited, outsourcing certain aspects to an agency — like content scheduling, caption writing, or hashtag strategy — can help maintain consistency without adding to your team’s workload.

You may find that capturing photos or videos in-house and passing them along to an agency for posting works best. This ensures fresh, timely content without the hassle of managing every detail.

When should I hire a digital marketing agency?

To improve your website’s SEO and increase organic traffic

If your in-house team can’t keep up with the nuances of SEO, it’s time to bring in the experts.

SEO is fundamental to getting your site seen, but it’s far from a one-size-fits-all solution. It takes ongoing attention, work, and a deep understanding of both on and off-site SEO tactics to rank high and stay ranked high.

An agency will create a comprehensive SEO strategy that aligns with your specific goals, covering key areas like:

• Deep keyword research to target the right audience
• On-page optimization to improve visibility, from meta descriptions to header tags
• Content creation that considers what your audience is actually searching for
• Site performance improvements, from navigation to mobile optimization
• Building valuable backlinks to boost your site’s authority
• Performance tracking to refine strategies and stay ahead of the curve

When an agency handles these technical details, you free up your team to focus on bigger-picture goals, knowing that your SEO is in the best hands.

To manage and optimize your digital advertising campaigns

With an agency managing your digital ads, you’ll rest easy knowing your budget is being spent efficiently, your ads are reaching the right people, and your strategy is always evolving to stay competitive.

Digital advertising is one of the fastest ways to get your brand in front of the right audience. However, making the most of it is no easy feat. If you’re struggling to create effective campaigns, manage budgets, or keep up with performance tracking, an agency will give your campaigns the focus they need.

Applying their specialized expertise, an agency positions your brand for paid advertising success by:

• Crafting targeted campaigns on platforms like Google Ads and Meta
• Selecting and optimizing keywords for maximum visibility
• Writing engaging ad copy and designing eye-catching visuals
• Leveraging advanced targeting to refine audience demographics and interests
• Setting and managing budgets to ensure your ads reach the right people without overspending
• Testing different ad variations to identify the most effective strategy
• Monitoring and adjusting campaigns to keep things running smoothly

To monitor campaign success through advanced analytics tracking and reporting

Let an agency take the guesswork out of ad management, using data to refine and enhance your campaigns for maximum performance.

Analytics and lead tracking require more than just simple data collection. It takes advanced know-how to make sense of your metrics, assess your performance, and use the insights as fuel for your future strategy. If you’re feeling lost in a sea of metrics, an agency will interpret the numbers and guide you toward smarter decisions.

Trust your advanced tracking and reporting to an agency when you need support with:

• Tracking leads from forms, calls, and other inquiries
• Identifying the top-performing marketing channels to allocate resources effectively
• Analyzing lead quality to improve conversion rates and maximize ROI
• Conversion tracking set-up to measure sales, sign-ups, and other key outcomes
• Making sense of your data with customized reports and KPI dashboards 
• Conducting an ROI analysis to showcase the effectiveness of your efforts
• Optimizing your campaigns based on performance data

To craft and execute customized email marketing strategies

With an agency’s guidance, your email marketing will be a well-oiled machine that consistently delivers high-quality, results-driven campaigns.

Email marketing often gets treated as an internal “check the box” task without much thought beyond getting the message sent. But when the average cold email open rate is only 27.7%, it’s clear that every detail matters to help your emails stand out in a cluttered inbox.

From timing to content, getting it right from the start is how you improve opens, reads, and conversions. An agency helps support your email strategy by:

• Developing the right mix, whether that’s newsletters, nurture campaigns, or frequent email reminders
• Curating relevant, targeted content that aligns with recipients’ interests and needs
• Crafting compelling subject lines designed to increase open rates
• Designing visually appealing emails that work across all types and prompt clicks
• Segmenting your audience to send the right emails to the right people at the right time
• Timing emails to ensure they land in inboxes at peak engagement times

But I Don’t Want to Give Up Control! How Do I Balance In-House and Outsourced Marketing?

Still debating between in-house vs. agency marketing, or a hybrid approach?

For the aspects you are currently handling internally, take a moment and ask yourself if it’s the right responsibility for your business. As you go through each item, think…

Yes, you CAN do it, but…

1. Are you doing it well?
2. Are you doing consistently?
3. Are you monitoring results and making adjustments?
4. If you were not spending time on this, what else could you be doing?

If you’re worried about losing control over your marketing when you outsource, rest assured. While your agency will take the heavy lifting off your plate, you’ll still have the head seat at the dinner table. The best agency for you will integrate themselves as part of your team and include you in the strategy and reporting of results, at a minimum.

Find Your Right Approach to Working With a Marketing Agency

Are you feeling stretched thin in your marketing approach?

When your in-house team partners with an agency, you create a dream duo that distributes the workload, increases your day-to-day efficiency, and grants you the extra bandwidth to achieve sustainable success.

If you’re a higher education marketer interested in further assessing your ideal marketing approach, check out our Higher Ed SEO Quiz. This 5-question quiz will help you determine whether to outsource your work, keep it internal, or take on a hybrid strategy. In just minutes, you’ll have personalized insights to make informed staffing choices.

See how Search Influence can help you develop a marketing plan that works for your team today!

Images:

1. Unsplash
2. Unsplash