As one of the more established Online Marketing agencies, we have always taken pride in being open and transparent with our clients and even with prospective clients before they’ve signed up to work with us—occasionally turning down work if we feel Online Marketing in general and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) in particular isn’t a good fit for their business.

Transparency is part of our business ethics in a not-typical ethical industry that loves its secrets. We even help train clients so that they understand SEO better and can start to do elements of the campaign themselves, in effect, making their budgets go further.

With, we estimate, up to 140 factors affecting how an individual website performs online (in search results), that’s a lot of learning, and we are yet to have a client who has mastered all 140, but that’s not to say it couldn’t happen. You may wonder why we’d train clients and their staff to do our jobs and even do us out of a job; the reasoning is simple, it’s the right thing to do, it makes them better clients, they fully appreciate what we do, and this leads to a more harmonious relationship for all concerned.

So far, we’ve never lost a client because of this transparency. Let’s face it—there aren’t many things worse than feeling you are being taken advantage of, so we don’t do that. We even have a system for calculating, based on years of experience, what the sweet spot budget should be for optimum client ROI—so we won’t even take too much money!

You may have noticed that I’m already starting to give some hints as to why it makes good sense to work with a good external supplier rather than try a DIY approach – so here are two to get you started-

  • You gain an appreciation of which of the techniques to be deployed are likely to be most significant and effective
  • You will be committing to the right level of resources, not too much (wasting time, money, and opportunity cost) and not too little, making it all a disappointing waste of time.

These answers lead to an important third point…

  • Why use your valuable staff for a skill you can buy when they could be working on the things only your team understands – your clients and products? This is the missed opportunity cost when you attempt DIY Online Marketing.

Aside from these factors, are there things that a good internal marketing team cannot do that a good agency can?

We don’t think so, given enough budget, people and time it is entirely possible to skill up or buy in an internal team to do your own online marketing. This has the advantage that you are in control, they only work for your business and to your goals. Given time, they should be able to develop a robust strategy, too, and none of the skill sets required to be good at online marketing are beyond top students skilled at maths, English and analysis, provided they get the right teachers. But there are some issues to consider.

  • Not all teachers are good, most just follow the heard and learn from online forums and chat groups meaning they tend to follow the official word of businesses like Google. This means your strategy will be like most of your competitors and is unlikely to think outside the box. In contrast, we developed our own SEO strategies 15 years ago and have followed them ever since – they are often at odds with the herd, but we’ve never had a client penalised or banned by a search engine.
  • An internal-focused team will do your bidding, but rarely will they challenge you and ask difficult questions – their careers are on the line, as well as that next pay increase. Our clients seem to like to have their thinking challenged, and often, our outside-the-box thinking and research have led to new market opportunities for them in unexpected areas.
  • An internal team can measure the effect of what they do, but they don’t have the advantage of comparing results with other campaigns at the same time, other industries etc. This matters because they won’t spot when Google says it impacts your business rather than a sub-set of business types or geographic areas, or is it a global change? Too many things will also be done simultaneously, making it hard to see the wheat for the chaff. In contrast, an external agency tends to work through a programme of tasks one at a time as they won’t have excess resources to be deployed.
  • Resourcing is another issue. A good agency is always looking for ways to become more efficient and do the job better, as this is where their profitability lies. In contrast, in many companies, there is an inbuilt bias to keep throwing resources and people at a problem, as managers get bigger rewards when they manage bigger pots. So, it’s easy to overcommit resources to online marketing.

It would be wrong to mention names but two companies we have worked with have both been spending way too much resource in online marketing versus what they could / should have got away with by outsourcing to a good agency – in one case, they were perhaps wasting in excess of £100,000 per month (and getting poor results), in the other probably “just” £20,000 a month and getting OK results. In both cases, an external agency with the right strategy could have achieved results of around £3-4,000 per month, which is a considerable saving.

The final point to consider is what happens in an emergency. Your website suddenly drops down the rankings, or you encounter major problems when implementing a new look and feel, and all your lead generation dries up.

  • Coping with these challenges may be beyond the skill sets of your internal team. You may simply not have enough people. They could be on holiday, etc., or it’s midnight, and they stop work at 6pm. A good external agency should have plans in place to cope with challenges like this and have the spare resources to switch people from one client campaign to another in extreme circumstances.

In summary, there is no reason why you couldn’t do effective Online Marketing yourself, but more often than not, it does not deliver the cost savings or strategic control that was expected.

Don’t do it—put your efforts into finding a good agency with valid recommendations and focus your own people on what you do best: your business.

Stuart Haining
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