Should Your Business Do Inbound Marketing In-House?

As an agency that specializes in developing and delivering cost-effective, ROI-driven agile inbound marketing campaigns for customers nationwide, you might assume that we’d answer the question “should your business do inbound marketing in-house” with an unqualified “yes!” But that’s not necessarily true — which is why it’s not necessarily our answer.

Here’s why: the question really isn’t whether your business should or shouldn’t do inbound marketing in-house, but whether your business COULD you do it in a way that drives bottom-line results. To help you make this determination, here are some basic pieces of the puzzle that need to be part of your environment:

Technology

You need an advanced content management system (CMS) that will allow you to publish fresh content — including creating new web pages and landing pages — and track a full range of analytics.

You also need technology to strategically identify keywords. Keep in mind that the free tools available online are far too basic — and usually just test drives to get you to buy something — and keyword suggestion tools offered by Google (AdWords) and Microsoft (Bing) are not strategic. In fact, may times the recommendations (which of course are not vetted by a human being) are completely off-track.

Content Creation

The fuel for your inbound marketing engine is content, content and (let’s say it together this time) yet more content. We’re talking blog posts, ebooks, white papers, infographics, social media posts/tweets/updates, e-newsletters…and the list goes on.

Without a fresh supply of quality and buyer persona-targeted content, your inbound marketing campaigns won’t get off the ground. Or if they do, then it’s only a matter of time before they start sputtering and falling back down to earth with a thud.

This is a very important consideration, because many businesses that bring inbound marketing in-house vastly underestimate the workload, and assign it to staff members who simply don’t have the capacity to get it done on time. This invariably creates a backlog and bottleneck, that brings inbound marketing momentum to a screeching halt. It also tends to foster a great deal of staff resentment (i.e. “I didn’t sign-up for this!”), which can lead to turnover.

Knowledge Capital

Even if you have enough staff to handle the workload — and this is a big if, but it’s certainly possible — then you also need to ensure that they have the proper skills. Merely allocating tasks like “write five blogs and an ebook” to the marketing coordinator who doesn’t and can’t actually do this for a living (i.e. he or she couldn’t walk into an enterprise that needed a specialist in this area and walk out with a job) is not going to work.

At a minimum, your in-house team will need the following specialized skills: project management, content writing, copywriting, market research, graphic design, web design, and analytics/reporting. If you want to add video to your inbound marketing mix, then you’ll need skills in this area as well.

Budget

If you don’t have a separate inbound marketing budget, then know this without any hesitation: your plan to run things in-house won’t work. In fact, it will backfire.

This is simply because there is no way — whatsoever — to absorb the workload into everyone’s schedule (again, assuming that they have the required skills in the first place), without displacing other work and tasks. After all, there are only so many hours in a day.

This is critically important to keep in mind, because the number one reason that businesses opt to try (and usually fail) to bring inbound marketing in-house is not to have more control or to be closer to the action, but to save money.

Yet most of the time, the anticipated cost savings fail to materialize. The money that a business thought (and hoped) it would save by doing things in-house is completely off-set — and then some — by extra staffing and technology costs. In other words, businesses spend far more to get much less, which isn’t strategic. It’s scary.

The Bottom Line

If you have the technology, content creation capacity, knowledge capital and budget — in other words, if you could actually function like a legitimate inbound marketing agency if you wanted to — then you’re probably a good candidate to bring inbound marketing in-house.

But if you fall short in any of these critical areas, then it’s a foregone conclusion that partnering to some extent (you can customize the relationship) with an agency is essential. Frankly, it’s either something you acknowledge now, or figure our later. Doing it now is much cheaper and a lot less stressful!

Learn More

To learn more about how we can be part of your inbound marketing success story — either by running everything for you, or picking up the pieces that you can’t do in-house, or don’t want to do in-house — then contact the Leap Clixx team today. Your consultation with us is free.

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