Get my Free Digital Marketing Jumpstart Kit<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nOn the flip side of things, if you’re in an in-house role, it might be a little bit more scoped for you in which your marketing role is going to be just in the context, for example of being an email marketing manager, or maybe it’s just in the context of creating content because you’re the content lead. And so this is something that you’re going to have to factor into consideration is how important is it for you to have that broad breadth of skills in the list of responsibilities that are ongoing for you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The last thing that I’ll say about working in an agency is that more often than not, the pay is going to be less than working in-house. The reason why in most situations this is the case is because agencies run on a churn and burn model. What I mean by that is they love to hire people fresh out of college that have no skill sets, just train them up as generalist, and then gradually pay them a little bit more. But for the most part, whenever you’re working for a consulting firm, you’re never going to extract the maximum amount of value that you’re actually generating for your clients. And the reason why is because your marketing firm or your marketing agency is getting the bulk of that value creation that you’re giving to your clients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas on the flip side of things, when you’re in-house, you may be able to dictate more close to market terms in terms of digital marketing rates and things like that, just because everything in terms of accountability starts and ends with you. It really goes back to that point of you’re able to tackle the problem, head on, go deep on it as well and work on it in terms of start to finish execution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes with marketing agencies, you’re actually only contracted to in the scope of getting it ramped up before then passes into the in-house team. So your mileage may vary, but generally speaking, what I have found from interviewing as well as hiring past folks from marketing agencies is that after a while they get tired of getting under comped for what they’re actually doing and so they start to look for in-house roles to get closer to market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why I’ve chosen in-house?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The first reason why I’ve chosen to always be in-house is because I love the autonomy of not being on someone else’s time. When you’re working for a marketing agency, you’re going to be having a number of different clients and workloads that you’re going to have to balance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And what that means is that when you’re not working on one client, it’s taking away from the other time to work on your other clients whereas when you’re working in-house, you’re working on the same core problem. And so that sort of prioritization issue is not as big of an issue. I love being able to know that our goals are our goals when we set them for our quarter and not someone else’s where it’s a client that has really unrealistic expectations or no basic understanding of marketing to be able to set a reasonable goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whenever you’re working in a business like an agency model, it means that there is a client relationship that also has to be maintained. It also means that you’re providing some consultative services, which are always going to be subject to different standards from the client. Whereas in the flip side of things, when you’re in-house, again, your goals are your goals, and as a result, you don’t have to deal with the stress of meeting a ton of different client’s needs, as well as the potential Karen here and there that might come up in the wild.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The other two reasons why I’d say I’ve always liked to be in-house is because I’m able to own all of our wins and losses full hardly as opposed to sometimes in consulting engagements or like an agencies, it’s not something in which the outcomes are truly always directly tied back to the agency. And then also I’ve been able to go deeply into each problem. So if, for example, I’m doing an entire rehaul of marketing pages, I’m able to go from start to finish and also continue to iterate on that six to 12 to 18 months later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My recommendations<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Something I want to make sure I cover today as well is my general recommendation for folks, for which one might be right for you. If you’re early on in your career, I might suggest you check out an agency or at least explore joining another agency if you don’t have the generalist skills that you need to be a good marketer. That’s just because it’ll give you the exposure that you need to just get a baseline understanding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So after you spend 12 to 18 months in an agency, you might get a good sense of exactly what the upper limit of that skill set is going to. But it can be a great building block for foundational skills. The reason why I say this is because a lot of in-house marketing situations are not going to have this sort of structural support or regiment that an agency might have because agencies are so used to working on multiple projects and multiple industries and clients at once that they’re going to modularize you in terms of the sort of work that you’re doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the flip side of things, if you have a little bit more experience, definitely keep an open ear to in-house positions. The main thing that I’d say here is to make sure that you’re lying on the actual product or service that you would be marketing because you’re going to be marketing a lot. And so that’s a big thing that I think people have disconnect on sometimes when it comes to in-house roles is they realize after six months they don’t actually care about XYZ construction app company that they’ve been working for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you liked this article, be sure to check out my YouTube channel<\/a> to get new videos every single week. I\u2019ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might benefit from learning whether or not a marketing agency or in-house is good for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n