5 Reasons to Hire a B2B Inbound Marketing Agency vs. an In-House Team

You’re convinced that inbound marketing is the best way to attract, engage, and delight new and existing customers to your B2B company. 

So, you start crafting your marketing strategy and the budget behind it. It’s then that you pause and realize that you have a decision to make:

If I really want to do this right the first time, should I hire an internal marketing team or an agency?

Full disclosure: we are a B2B inbound marketing agency that works with companies in complex industries such as manufacturing, distribution, and industrial contracting. That fact might make you question how objective this article will be. It’s no secret that we’re rooting for team agency.

But there’s a reason for that. In fact, there are five.

1. Inbound Marketing Expertise

When you first decided to pursue an inbound growth strategy for your organization, you might have made a list of all the people you need on your marketing dream team similar to this one:

• Marketing strategist
• Project manager
• Content Writer
• SEO expert
• Analytics specialist
• Web designer
• Graphics designer
• Video producer
• Paid media specialist
• Social media coordinator

That’s a great list. The problem is that your budget probably only covers the salary of one or two of those positions, if you’re lucky. According to salary.com, a marketing manager alone earns north of $100,000 on average each year. An SEO strategist or web designer can bring in around $65,000 each. You’ll have to pay an analytics and paid media specialist more than that. And the list goes on.

While some might argue that hiring an agency is expensive, staffing and budgetary constraints are actually a big reason many organizations choose to work with an inbound marketing agency. 

A reputable firm will have already invested in finding and hiring a team of experts for you, and will charge a fraction of what it would cost to add those team members to your payroll. 

2. Access to a Robust Tech Stack

Regardless of whether you work with an agency, you’ll need to invest in technology. Weidert Group is a certified HubSpot agency partner and can tailor a solution for you. HubSpot pretty much invented inbound marketing and offers a full suite of software that serves the entire organization, not just marketing. It’s why we use it and recommend it to our clients.

RELATED: Why Go HubSpot for Inbound Success?

Beyond HubSpot, however, we leverage and invest in numerous other digital marketing tools to supplement HubSpot’s robust functionalities. Just a few include:

The list is a lot longer than that, but you get the picture. Our team knows how to use each one, has vetted them for their effectiveness, and knows what works best in a given situation. For a company to subscribe to these tools and become proficient in using all of them could be prohibitive.

3. Smaller Learning Curve

Want results fast? Of course you do. An experienced inbound marketing agency won’t need to ramp up their team’s operations to understand all that technology or the inbound methodology. They’ve seen it work in different situations like yours and can use those insights to benefit your company. When you work with an agency that specializes in your complex B2B industry, they can hit the ground running. 

An inbound marketing agency has already done the learning, and they’ll keep learning to stay one step ahead. What’s more, they’re happy to transfer that knowledge by teaching and training their clients. The less time you spend ramping up your marketing efforts, the faster you’ll get results and ROI.

4. Greater Flexibility

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last few years, it’s that businesses need to be able to pivot at a moment’s notice. When you work with an experienced inbound marketing agency, you have the flexibility to spend more when you need more, or pull back when necessary. 

Having an internal team comes with fixed labor costs that make it much harder to scale back without having to make some extremely difficult decisions that might involve scaling back your team. Boosting your marketing efforts by adding qualified team members comes with challenges, too, especially in today’s tight labor market.

5. A Dedicated Team

Here at Weidert Group, we’ve worked with dozens of complex industries to help them grow through strategic inbound marketing and sales programs. One thing we’ve noticed is that most of our partner contacts wear many hats. In addition to marketing, they also might oversee their sales teams, operations, or engineering (as is the case with one of our clients). 

That’s not unusual for mid-size B2B organizations. And it’s ok. One thing these clients appreciate most about partnering with our team is that they can focus on other critical functions of their organization while we focus on the critical work of positioning them as an industry leader and bringing in sales qualified leads.

Each of our partners works with a dedicated inbound marketing consultant, specialist, strategist, and on-staff writer. Plus, our team of web and graphic designers, SEO experts, paid media specialists, videographers, and others collaborate to deliver results. To hire a dedicated in-house marketing department with such broad expertise is a big leap for many organizations. 

It costs you nothing to explore whether hiring a B2B inbound marketing agency is the right move for your company. We recommend becoming familiar with the inbound methodology by accessing our Step-by-Step Guide to Inbound Marketing below. Then, contact us to see whether our team is a fit for yours.