Balancing Your In-House Marketing Team and an Outside Creative Agency

In the world of advertising, there’s no right or wrong way to solve your brand’s creative problems.

Marketing directors are looking for solutions, and however they come, they’ll take them. In fact, it’s not unusual for marketing directors to have both an in-house marketing team and an outside creative agency. When managed correctly, the two can make magic happen. But once the wires are crossed, things can quickly get out of hand.

In this blog, we’ll take a look at how to balance the relationship between the two, what to expect from each, and how to find ways to maximize the potential of both teams. 

What Should Your In-House Marketing Team Be Great At?

Your in-house team is uniquely positioned to do things that an outside agency isn’t, and vice versa.

Organizing a Library of Marketing Materials

It’s your brand, so your team should always be the best stewards of your brand’s vast marketing assets. Organizing and managing those materials means also understanding how to share access to them. Your internal team should use platforms to control different access tiers to your materials. Your sales team may require full access, but an outside partner might have limited access.

Understanding & Responding to the Most Meaningful Marketing Tools That Your Sales Team Needs

This is all about supporting your brand’s investment in a new marketing strategy by updating internal and external tools that match. This includes things like presentations, product data sheets, or leave behinds. The in-house team must ensure that these tools travel and are easily accessible, using the technology other departments are comfortable using. 

Collaborating With Outside Agency on Campaign Build Outs

This is one of those things that shouldn’t have to be said, but we’re going to say it: Your in-house team needs to be good at playing nice with your agency. You can hire an agency to develop ideas, but without your in-house teams being on board and engaging in the relationship, it can fall apart quickly.  

Your in-house team should also be there to help an agency understand the marketing toolkit your team manages, and share your ideas for new elements you’re considering.

What Should Your Agency Be Great At?

Part of hiring an agency is getting something different from your in-house marketing team. The same way, you’d expect something from a restaurant that you're not sure how to cook at home.

Exploring Fresh Ideas and Messages for Brand Launches or Marketing Campaigns

If you get nothing else from an agency, be sure to get this: You’re paying for fresh, on-strategy, on-brand ideas, and you should get them. Beyond giving you the ideas you’re looking for, they should also be good at delivering ideas you didn't even know you wanted. 

Understanding the Customers You Have Now, and the Ones You’ll Need Tomorrow

An agency should have their finger on the pulse of reliable research and direct observations regarding the things that drive your customers’ decisions. The toolkit of an agency allows them the flexibility to have the bigger picture in mind. This lets them keep you up-to-date on your customers' changing expectations, while searching for new customers you’re missing out on.

Forming a Good Relationship With Your in-House Team

Again, this kind of goes without saying, but we’re going to say it anyway: A good agency shouldn’t just get along with your in-house team, they should thrive together. Think shark and remora fish. Or peanut butter and jelly. They don’t work together every day, and they probably shouldn’t, but each team’s work will impact the other’s. Sure, it doesn’t need to be all hugs and kisses—don't be weird—but at bare minimum, open lines of communication between the leadership of both teams should be maintained.

Figuring out How to Balance Both

At first thought, having both could seem redundant, but there’s a reason both outside ad agencies and in-house marketing teams exist: sweet, glorious budgets. You’ll pay a bit more for an agency to handle a high number of quick-turnaround or highly technical assignments than you would by keeping them in-house, but it usually doesn’t make sense to staff up with full-time specialists in research, media, and creative—not to mention all the analytical software and research tools that an agency has.

If your business is booming, that comes with problems that an agency is likely better equipped to handle. Your in-house team will inevitably have overflow that the agency should be able to handle, quickly, and at a reasonable cost. Likewise, when called upon, your in-house team should have enough creative juice to come up with big ideas in a pinch. 

You still might be wondering how you’re going to get the best out of both. Lean toward your outside agency for ideas and insights that will impact your long-term goals. Push your in-house team for ideas and executions that impact your short-term goals. Maximize what each team does best.

Mad Genius has a proven track record when it comes to working with other agencies, in-house marketing teams, and more. Want to learn more about we do? Fill out the form beyond and have one of our geniuses get started today.

Hugs and kisses.