In-house marketing vs agency: how to choose, and what to keep doing yourself

By Zach Schleien

What in-house marketing and an agency each do well, where each one falls short, what to keep inside your company no matter what, and how to decide which fits you.

Choose in-house marketing when marketing is daily work and the person doing it needs to know your product well. Choose an agency when you need a specialist skill fast and you don't have enough work to keep a full-time person busy.

In-house means employees on your payroll who work only for you. An agency is an outside company you pay to do the work, usually alongside work for other clients. You don't have to pick one forever, and a lot of companies end up with a mix.

I've hired agencies more than once. At Filteroff, my video dating company, I hired a Facebook ads agency and an influencer recruitment agency, and both underperformed. I also used outsourced sales agencies, and I ended up letting them go. What I learned from that applies whichever way you go.

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Key takeaways

• In-house gives you control, speed and people who know your product. It costs more to set up, and a bad hire is slow to undo.
• An agency gives you specialist skills right away without hiring. You get less control and only part of their attention.
• Learn the job yourself before you hire either one. You can't manage what you don't understand.
• Keep your offer, your message, your customer conversations, your numbers and your account logins inside the company, no matter who does the rest.
• A common setup is one person inside who owns the plan, plus outside help for specialist jobs.

In-house marketing: what you get and what it costs

An in-house marketer is your employee and works only on your company.

What in-house does well

• They learn your product and your customers. They can hear sales calls, read support emails and see which questions keep coming up. That turns into better ads and better landing pages.
• They move fast. You don't wait for an approval cycle or the next weekly call to fix a headline.
• You set the priorities. If something breaks on Tuesday, it becomes their job on Tuesday.
• What they learn stays with you. Test results, winning headlines and lessons from failed campaigns build up inside your company.

Where in-house falls short

• It costs more up front. You pay salary, benefits and tools every month, including slow months, plus the time it takes to hire and train someone.
• One person can't do everything well. Ads, email, design, copywriting and tracking are different skills. A single hire is usually strong in one or two of them.
• Hiring mistakes are slow to fix. A weak hire can take months to spot and longer to replace.
• When they leave, what they know leaves too, unless they wrote it down.

Marketing agency: what you get and what it costs

You usually pay an agency a monthly retainer, a project fee or an hourly rate. Some agencies do one thing, like paid ads, SEO or PR. Full-service agencies cover a lot of channels under one contract. If you're looking at one, What Does a Full-Service Marketing Agency Actually Do? covers what it should handle and what you should still own.

What an agency does well

• You get specialists right away. An ad buyer, a designer and a copywriter, without hiring three people.
• You can start fast and stop. You can scale the work up or down or end the contract, which is much harder to do with employees.
• They've seen other accounts. A good agency has watched what works for other clients and can skip some of the trial and error.

Where an agency falls short

• You share them. Your account is one of many, so your work competes with every other client for their time.
• They don't know your product the way you do. Every new person on your account has to learn it from scratch.
• Leaving can get messy. If the ad account, website login or email list is in the agency's name, you have to get it back before you can switch.
• The person who sold you may not be the person doing the work. This is the one that hurt me.

My first outsourced sales agency started me with a great rep, then swapped her out for a string of weak salespeople. The second agency handed me off to a guy who kept selling the smallest package, and the close rate was stuck around 18%. I spent a few weeks trying to train him before I realized the real problem was the person making the calls. When we were running out of cash, I let the agencies go to get my retainer back.

Learn the job before you hire anyone

After I let the sales agencies go, I had to take the sales calls myself. I hadn't done consistent sales calls in years, and the first couple of days were nerve-wracking. My close rate started around 20% and nearly doubled within 30 days.

The business hit $50K in revenue in a single month with me running the ads, building the landing pages, writing the copy and taking the sales calls, all before the acquisition.

That's why my advice is to learn the job before you decide who does it. Instead of hiring someone full-time for $100K to $200K a year, hire them as a consultant and pay them to teach you, maybe for a month or two. The same goes for agencies. Looking back at the ads agency and the influencer agency, I'd pay agencies to teach me over one month, then run it myself. If you'd rather bring in part-time help, I covered the roles you can hire and how to learn the skill while they do the work in Fractional marketing: what it is, the roles you can hire, and when it makes sense.

You can't manage what you don't understand. Once you've done the work yourself, even for a few weeks, you can read an agency report and know whether it's good, and you can tell in an interview whether a marketer has actually done the job.

What to keep in-house no matter who does the work

Even if an agency runs most of your marketing, a few things should stay with you.

• Your offer and your prices. Nobody outside the company should decide what you sell or what it costs.
• Your message. Who you help, what problem you solve and why someone should pick you. An agency can write the words, but you decide what they say.
• Customer conversations. Sit in on sales calls or listen to the recordings. When I managed sales teams, I watched their recorded calls and coached reps with specific feedback, and close rates went from 20% to 40% after coaching sessions. You can't find fixes like that if you never hear the calls.
• Your accounts. Your ad accounts, domain, website, email list, CRM and analytics should be in your company's name. Give the agency user access, not ownership.
• Your numbers. Track cost per lead, cost per booked call, close rate and cost per sale yourself, not only in the agency's report. How to calculate customer acquisition cost without fooling yourself shows how to work out what each new customer costs you.

How to decide: in-house, agency or a mix

Go through these lists and see which one sounds most like your business right now.

In-house usually makes more sense when

• Marketing is daily work, like weekly emails, constant content or a launch every month.
• Your product takes time to explain, and the marketer needs to really understand it.
• You already know which channel works and need someone to run it every day.
• You can afford to pay someone through slow months.
• You've done the job yourself long enough to write down how it's done.

An agency usually makes more sense when

• You need a specialist skill for a short stretch, like a website rebuild, a launch or setting up an ad account.
• You want to test a new channel before you commit to a full-time hire.
• Your workload goes up and down by season.
• Someone inside the company, you included, can judge the work and read the numbers.

A mix makes sense when

You want one person inside who owns the plan, the message and the numbers, and outside help for the specialist jobs. That inside person can be a full-time marketing lead. It can also be a fractional CMO, a part-time marketing leader who owns the plan and manages the outside help. I explained what one does and how to pick one in Fractional CMO: what one is, what they actually do, and how to pick one. Either way, someone on your side has to own the results.

How to make an agency work if you hire one

• Ask who will do the work day to day. Meet that person before you sign, and put it in the contract that you'll be told before they change.
• Start small. Try one project or a short first term before you sign a long contract.
• Agree on the numbers up front. Pick the two or three numbers that matter most, like cost per lead and cost per sale, and get them every week.
• Ask them to teach you. Have them walk you through what they changed each week and why. That way you get the skill along with the work.
• Set a review date before you start. Decide now what result by what date means you keep going, and what means you stop.

How to build in-house without wasting a hire

• Do the job yourself first, or pay a consultant to teach you for a month or two.
• Write down how the job is done before you hire, so you can train the person and judge their work against it.
• Hire for the channel that already works, not the one you keep hearing about.
• Have them sit in on sales calls. A lot of good ad and landing page ideas come from what buyers say on those calls.
• Give them good tools. One person with the right AI tools can now cover jobs that used to need extra help.

My friend Ryan runs a low-ticket SaaS. He used to need a designer for his ads and a software engineer for website changes. I helped him rebuild his ads and landing page with AI tools. We had Manus, an AI agent that does research, analyze all of his competitors, and we rebuilt his landing page in Lovable, an AI app builder. Now Ryan can run A/B tests from ad to landing page without waiting on a developer. He can literally move like a hundred times faster, and it's so much cheaper.

Where to start this week

1. Write down every marketing job that happens in your business today, and who does it.
2. Mark each one as daily work that needs product knowledge, or specialist work you need now and then.
3. For the daily work, do it yourself for a few weeks before you hire for it.
4. For the specialist work, try an agency or freelancer on one project, with your accounts in your name and a review date on the calendar.

Want help deciding what to keep in-house and what to hand to an agency? Book a consultation.