Digital Marketing for Manufacturers: In-House vs Outsourced Marketing
Marketing is a core aspect of all business and without any marketing, your company will suffer. However, marketing can be a time-consuming effort required around the clock, especially for global companies. This is why more people are turning to outsourcing marketing to get the most from their marketing budget and explore different marketing channels for a more complete and unified approach.
However, outsourced marketing services aren't suitable for every company, much like how investing in in-house digital marketing isn't ideal for others. What is right will depend on your company, capabilities, and what you want to gain from your marketing efforts.
If you want to know more about the benefits and disadvantages of both options, we take a deeper look at what you can expect from in-house and external marketing for manufacturers.
Outsourced marketing is when a business hands over all of their marketing requirements to be fulfilled by a third-party company. This company will have skilled and experienced marketers on staff who then handle all of the marketing required for your company. You can gain regular feedback and insight into how the marketing is going without worrying about implementing it yourself.
Outsourcing marketing for manufacturers means you can tap into a wealth of knowledge and experience that covers both marketing and manufacturing to help you create an impactful marketing campaign without physically doing so.
What exactly are the benefits of using a manufacturing marketing agency? Below are some of the common reasons businesses choose to outsource their marketing rather than employ and inhouse team.
Out-of-the-Box Thinking
Outsourced marketing services allow you to access a pool of creative minds experienced in coming up with fresh ideas and out of the box thinking. If you hire an in-house digital marketing team, over time, ideas and processes have the potential to become stagnant, without being born into the right environment for them to flourish. Outsourced marketers will have their finger on using new changes and trends within digital marketing. They will be ready to spin this to your advantage to continually breathe new life into your marketing campaigns.
Utilise the Skills of Experienced Marketing Professionals
The keyword in 'experienced marketing professionals' is experienced. They will know this industry intricately, and their only task is to get the best results for your company. Unlike in-house marketing, where you will have other commitments pulling at your time, external marketers will be focused on one thing: honing their skills and learning new techniques. You can use their knowledge and experience to give your marketing efforts a push in the right direction without making any mistakes that can be costly.
A company that offers digital marketing for manufacturers will likely have various employees with more specific and defined skills in different areas, rather than relying on one person to do everything or redistributing niche workloads such as outsourcing SEO services. This will allow you to tap into other knowledge pools and skills and pull them together. There may be PPC experts, social media experts, or people adept at writing compelling targeted copy and implementing SEO services for example.
Access to the Best Tools and Technologies
While it might seem like there is nothing complicated about creating ads for social media or writing expert SEO copy, innovative thought, along with the right technology and tools, are necessary for successful campaigns. Instead of just putting your marketing resources out there into the world, you need to define your goals and your audience, and you need the right technology to maximise your campaigns.
Using insights to find out what is and isn't working is vital; you need the tools to track your methods and assess what is and isn't working to ensure the campaigns you undertake are sustainable for both short and long term goals. A manufacturing marketing agency will already have these tools and more at their disposal, combined with the expertise and skills of their employees; this can be a powerful combination that you can use to your advantage. Plus, they can relay your insights to you, so you understand what is happening and where your money is being spent, as well as allowing you to work with them to change anything you don't think is right.
Greater Speed and Efficiency
As marketing professionals will have a greater insight into modern practices and methods, they will be able to get your marketing campaign up and running to let you sit back under the reassurance that everything is being taken care of for you.
Moreover, they will typically be using more than one method of digital marketing for manufacturers, meaning that instead of focussing on one area at a time, they can set up an omnichannel strategy quickly, using their skills to achieve the results you need at a greater speed.
Say you want to quickly grow your social media channels or increase the efficiency of your PPC campaign. An experienced marketing company will know exactly what strategy works to enable this and launch it without missing a beat or impacting other parts of your marketing campaign.
Cost-Effective Marketing Solutions
When you factor in the cost of hiring a marketing department, getting the right tools and equipment in place and the time required for brainstorming and creating campaigns, using outsourced marketing services means that you will bypass all of this, allowing you to pour more money into getting results. And as your marketing experts will be focused on delivering leads and results, you will be looking at an altogether more cost-effective solution for your marketing.
Marketing agency costs are typically much lower than having an in-house team, and your money is better spent here where it needs to be instead of setting up technology and paying wages. This is definitely an advantage for smaller start-ups or SME manufacturing businesses.
Discover how a bespoke marketing strategy helped boost CS Labels' enquiries and help to realise ambitious growth plans.
Now you know the benefits of using outsourced marketing services, you need to know the benefits of using in-house digital marketing for manufacturers.
Increased Control
With in-house marketing, you and your team will have complete control over everything you do. You will have the final say in what is shared with potential clients and what the world sees of your company and your marketing spend.
If you want a more significant input or a more personal approach to your marketing, you can tweak your messaging by keeping all of your services in house.
Better Understanding of Company Values
In-house marketing allows you to control everything relating to your marketing entirely. Marketing for manufacturers can be a niche area, and as such, you will know your industry better than some outsourcing marketing companies. This in-depth knowledge of your industry and your company can help you better align your marketing efforts to improve understanding and awareness of your company values and cultivate the image you put out into the world.
As with anything, there are disadvantages to using in-house digital marketing for manufacturers.
Slow Start-Up
When building an in-house marketing team or taking on the marketing yourself, you will need to invest plenty of time and finances into researching how best to market your company and what you should avoid. When it comes to digital marketing for manufacturers, there are many options, but finding the method most suited to your manufacturing company can take some time, meaning you are slower to get started due to deciphering the ins and outs of each particular process.
More Significant Costs
Setting up in-house marketing team means you need to not only hire employees if you are unable to undertake this work yourself but also invest in the right tools and technology to implement your marketing efforts; this may involve establishing a digital media presence, using apps and software to track your success and results and also have someone assess your approach and continually tweak what you are doing until you get it right. All of this costs money and can severely impact your bottom line.
Lack of Resources
As a manufacturing company, it stands to reason that you won't have all the resources to hand to help you support an in-house marketing effort for maximum success, be it a lack of knowledge, skills or the technology to manage your marketing efficiently. One of the significant drawbacks is a lack of resources which can massively impact your end result.
In reality, there are benefits and negative implications when investing in house or outsourced marketing. You need to make sure you are asking all of the right questions to assess which option is suitable for your company and whether in-house digital marketing can work for you or not.
