The best way to achieve increase growth, brand awareness and customer conversions in any business is by investing in marketing. This involves building a marketing team that is well-acquainted with the marketing industry.
However, many business owners find it challenging to choose between hiring an in-house marketing team or a fractional marketing team for the job. While both options have great benefits, one is more suitable for certain businesses than the other. In this article, we will extensively discuss the similarities and differences between these options and provide factors to help you determine which is the best for your business.
The Essentials of Marketing Teams for Businesses
Before we discuss the best model for your company’s marketing needs, let us first discuss the importance of having a marketing team for business growth. Naturally, there is a gap between the creation of goods and services and delivering these goods or services to customers who need them.
Effective marketing helps to bridge this gap by calling attention to potential customers that need your goods or services and that starts with having a strong marketing team. A marketing team comprises marketing experts that play various roles in ensuring that a business has a working marketing strategy to achieve its goals and objectives.
You could have specialists such as marketing directors, chief marketing officers, digital marketing experts, product marketers, content strategists, and many others who work together to achieve success through effective marketing strategies. There are two major models that provide access to a team if you need one—you can build an internal or in-house marketing team, or hire an outsourced fractional marketing team.
About In-House Marketing Teams
Working with an in-house or internal marketing team is the traditional approach that many business owners take to fulfilling their marketing needs. An in-house marketing team includes a group of marketing experts that are employed by a company to work full-time and handle marketing activities internally.
This team makes use of a company’s resources and handles everything from planning, execution, branding, advertising, social media, and many more. The composition of an in-house marketing team can vary from business to business based on what is most important. For example, a small business may not have more than one or a few specialists like a graphic designer, a content creator, or a marketing manager, while a large business could have as many as 10-20 employees under the marketing department.
The specialists in an in-house marketing team do not have other commitments aside from attending to your company’s marketing tasks. Hence, they are easily integrated into a business’s system and mode of operation. However, this does not mean they are not without challenges.
Benefits of an In-House Marketing Team
Working with an in-house marketing team has several benefits. If you are considering building an internal marketing team, here are some benefits you can look forward to:
- Strong Coordination & Control:
An in-house marketing team allows a business owner to have a level of control over actions and decisions to be made. Because members of the team are under one roof, it is easy to follow up on strategies and ensure that the brand’s message and content is consistent. This opportunity for direct oversight also means that corrections or adjustments can be attended to quickly, making decision-making a swift process.
- Deep Brand Understanding:
No one understands your business better than a team of employees that spend hours under its roof. One advantage that an in-house marketing team has over other teams is the ability to easily integrate marketing employees into your brand’s values, culture, and vision. This understanding can then be easily translated into your marketing campaigns, ensuring that your brand has one voice with an authentic message.
- Easy Collaboration:
Another plus for the in-house marketing team model is the opportunity it provides to marketing team members to bond and collaborate with other departments. The growth of a company transcends beyond the marketing team alone; marketing employees may need to collaborate with other departments such as product development to achieve product success. By being in the same organisation, there can be better communication and collaboration between departments, yielding better results.
Disadvantages of an In-House Marketing Team
As much as an in-house marketing team seems like the best idea for a successful business, it does not come without its challenges. Here are a few to consider.
- High Costs:
Building a team of marketing experts that show up to your company on a daily basis demands a lot of resources. You need to cater for training fees, salaries, benefits, and many other overhead costs. If you are running a small business or a start-up, this can be challenging especially if you are looking to hire experts in the marketing field.
- Lack of Specialised Knowledge:
While a full-time team of employees is better acquainted with your business and its goals, they may have limited skills, knowledge, or expertise. The world of marketing keeps evolving, especially with growing digital trends and technologies. Without consistent exposure to these trends, it is possible to be stuck on the same level for so long; this usually happens with in-house marketing employees. In some instances, your business may also need special skills or expertise that an in-house marketing team may not possess. You may have to reach out to marketing consultants or undergo expensive training processes to bridge this gap.
About Fractional Marketing Teams
Creating a fractional marketing team is a modern approach to marketing that has proven to benefit businesses of all scales. What is fractional marketing? It involves working with top-level marketing professionals to meet a company’s marketing needs but on a part-time or contractual basis.
A fractional marketing team consists of a blend of marketing experts from marketing managers to content strategists who pool their skills and expertise to provide marketing solutions to a business. However, unlike in-house teams that work full-time within a company, fractional marketing teams work on a set schedule, quota or set number of hours. While they provide expert and result-yielding solutions to your marketing problems, their mode of operation is more flexible.
Fractional Marketing teams exist for various purposes— fractional marketing team for tech, fractional marketing team for SaaS, fractional content marketing teams, and fractional marketing team for manufacturing.
Benefits of a Fractional Marketing Team
Apart from flexibility and convenience, there are many other benefits that a business owner derives from investing in a fractional marketing team. Let’s see some of these benefits below.
- Better Resource Management:
Every business has a phase where there is a load of things to do but only little resources available to work with. Hiring a fractional marketing team is a cost-effective option when compared to working with an in-house team. Your team of fractional marketers work for a scheduled period and you pay for only the hours spent compared to the salary-model where you have to pay your employees even when there are no active projects on.
By spending less money in the marketing department, you can direct your company’s resources to other pressing matters like production or sales. This helps you yield better business results.
- Specialised Skills & Expertise:
While in-house marketing teams have better knowledge of a company’s values and marketing objective, a fractional marketing team has the level of expertise needed to achieve them. Many in-house employees spend years on the job with little exposure to marketing strategies and secrets. However, fractional marketers can work on several projects in a year, exposing them to various recent trends and tactics for marketing success. This means that if your business needs specialised marketing skills, a fractional marketing team has a higher chance of pulling results than an in-house team.
- Fresh Perspective:
Dealing with the ‘same old’ over and over again is a common problem with an internal marketing team. As time passes, you may realise that your in-house marketing team keeps working with the same strategy which may not be yielding results. Fractional marketing teams are beneficial in this aspect as external teams can provide insights that are different from the norm in a company.
As an external part of your business, fractional marketing teams provide a neutral perspective on your company’s marketing strategies, helping to remove the old and replacing them with fresh and innovative ideas backed up by a proven track record. This new perspective can help your business identify the gap in your marketing strategies which will help to create effective solutions.
Challenges of a Fractional Marketing Team
Just like in-house marketing teams, fractional marketing teams also have their disadvantages. Some of these are listed below.
- Communication Barriers:
The mode of communication between a business owner and a fractional marketing team can be less direct unless the proper processes are put in place. With a purpose-built fractional marketing team, we recommend establishing proper communication channels and processes to ensure they become an extension to your team.
- Less Oversight:
When working with an internal marketing team in your company, you can easily control the activities and decisions as the team works directly under your roof. However, a fractional marketing team may not have direct oversight over your internal business activities. To counteract this, the right quality control processes and communication channels can overcome this.
Factors To Consider When Choosing a Marketing Team Approach
Both in-house marketing teams and fractional marketing teams have their benefits. As a business owner, you have to carefully deliberate on these options before deciding what approach to use for your business marketing needs. Here are some important factors to guide your choice:
- Budget:
Before embarking on any project, one of the important considerations to make is your budget. This is also important when it comes to hiring a marketing team. If you have a limited budget, then a fractional marketing team is best as it helps you save overhead costs.
- Business Needs:
Another important factor to guide your decision on a marketing team is your business’s needs at that moment. A clear understanding of your company’s needs will help you decide if a fractional marketing team works or you need to hire a full-time team. For example, do you need many hands or specialised skills that are not present in your current team?
- Scope of Work:
The scope of work to be done by your marketing team also determines whether an in-house team or a fractional marketing team is the best fit. Also, if the scope of your marketing tasks requires deep brand knowledge, you may have to consider an internal marketing team.
Conclusion: Fractional Marketing Team or In-House Marketing Team?
Before you decide on which option to go for, you should consider factors such as your business needs, its size, and your goals (whether long-term or short term) to guide your choice.
In the case where your needs clash, you can decide to settle for the hybrid model, where you have a small internal team, but hire fractional marketing experts for special tasks. There is no one choice that is better for your business; as long as you consider the advantages and challenges of the two options and find ways to seek marketing management support, your business is good to go.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an in-house marketing team?
In simple terms, an in-house marketing team is the internal marketing department of a company. It consists of various marketing experts that work full-time playing different roles towards achieving a successful marketing strategy. The company size and scope of business determines the composition and the number of employees on the team.
What is the difference between in-house marketing team and agency marketing?
An in-house marketing team consists of marketing professionals that work as an internal team in a company; the resources for all tasks are provided by the company. Agency marketing, on the other hand, involves outsourcing marketing needs to external marketing teams.