Should You Hire an Agency or an In-House PPC Expert?

Weighing Your Options
There are both good and bad aspects of hiring in-house PPC experts instead of working with agencies; which solutions work the best for your company will have a lot to do with which particular proclivities define your operations.

For starters, you don’t want to use PPC in a vacuum.

With any outbound marketing technique, it’s important to have additional wings of potential impact.

You don’t know what’s going to work the best over time.

Some strategies are going to perform far ahead of your expectations, some simply aren’t; and the reasons why are hard to pin down.

Then there are options which seem not to work initially, but later turn out to be excellent marketing solutions.

Then there’s the best-case scenario, wherein multiple avenues of outreach end up being successful.

Or, none are successful, and you have to keep chipping away at the problem until you find something that works.

With all this in mind, you want to choose carefully when it comes to outbound digital marketing, and have a solution that reaches clientele on multiple fronts.

It makes sense to adopt SEO, or Search Engine Optimization (SEO), in conjunction with PPC, rather than one or the other singly.

When you’ve got some level of marketing redundancy, you can really tell whether an on-site PPC expert or an agency is more effective.

It may even happen that sometimes you are even able to manage PPC campaigns yourself if your organization is in that tightly-budgeted, burgeoning stage.

A CMS can be instrumental here.

Google Ads, Experts, And Agencies
Something else you’ll want to look into if you’re soloing it is Google AdWords.

Google Ads can be a big help to your organization, but utilizing this marketing solution requires a dedicated approach.

That said, if you’re in a position to dedicatedly address AdWords, and even hire some help, it’s better to do so.

Quite a few reasons recommend this approach, not least of which being the savings you’ll experience in terms of time and resources.

A professional PPC person must get results or lose the job.

So if you’ve got one on staff, you have some level of organic insurance pertaining to Return On Investment, or ROI.

In-house personnel understand that their paycheck relies on results, so they’re more apt to think critically, and try things someone in an exterior agency might not.

Think about it critically: if you’re in an agency with multiple clients, what is your motivation to bend over backward for every single one?

Are you doing it for honor?

Though agencies are apt to deliver actionable results, they’re unlikely to have personnel as motivated as an in-house marketing professional focused on something like AdWords or PPC campaigns.

If this employee wants to keep his or her job, then positive results can’t just be reported, either; they must be objectively measurable.

An agency may have more resources at their behest, accordingly rendering them the ability to more cohesively impact your target market; but you’re not  going to get the same sort of “top billing.

For a more in-depth look at this issue, here’s a great guide by Fang Digital Marketing called 5 ways your search agency is screwing you over.

An Agency
An agency of some caliber might be ideal to get you started, or help point you in the right direction; but they can’t be holding your hand perpetually.

Their primary goal is to get your PPC campaign to a place where it sustainably delivers ROI which matches your projections, then keeps it there—or, ideally, rising.

This can be a safe play, especially if there’s a “money back” guarantee or something else involved.

The thing is, with an agency, these results are likely going to remain static, and you’re likely to miss some attainable benefits that don’t require that much “footwork”.

The truth is, there comes a time when you’ve got to let go the hand of the agency and strike out on your own.

Working with the on-site PPC expert has, again, the added bonus of putting you in regular contact with an individual who has a core focus on “going the extra mile”, as it were.

He doesn’t want your figures to remain static just like you don’t. If you make money, the internal PPC expert makes money, too.

Hiring the right individual renders a much greater likelihood of measurable success over time in terms of PPC.

Where Agencies Outperform In-House Reps
There is one operational area where an in-house representative is at a clear disadvantage to an agency, and that’s in terms of innovative upgrades.

An internal marketing rep for your organization isn’t going to have any access to the latest and greatest digital marketing technology; they’ll only have your budget with which to work.

Meanwhile, an external agency has an in-built prerogative geared at providing the latest and greatest digital techniques to clients.

Yet with anything, you can’t allow yourself to be overwhelmed with the glitz and glamour accompanying new tech.

As pointed out earlier in this writing, sometimes one method works, sometimes no marketing strategies work, sometimes they all work!

The newness of a strategy or tech doesn’t guarantee its success.

Still, where external agencies become competitive over self-driven internal actors is in terms of the widespread, professional adoption of the newest techniques.

For this reason you may want to incorporate a hybrid solution which splits the difference between the outsourced digital marketing solution, and an in-house representative.

Find Your Solution
Here’s a strategy worth considering: let the in-house representative handle the bulk of your marketing, as this individual will give you the top-tier treatment such a marketing endeavor deserves.

But keep an agency on the books and consult them every couple of months to see if there are any changes in the waters.

If there are, bring this up to your internal representative, and give them the resources to employ the new marketing scheme.

Of course, if you have the right rep, they’ll likely already know about the market shift; but assumption is the mother of error, just as necessity is the mother of invention.

Don’t assume, plan-in redundancies under a paradigm of “fail-safe” marketing, and you’ll insulate yourself against failure.

Also, keep this in mind: what works for one company may not necessarily be what works for another.

Look at projected costs, see if there are success stories—or feedback from those which weren’t so successful—and find the company that fits you.

The likelihood is, you can find a good PPC solution; but anything worth doing is worth doing well.

Accordingly, do your due diligence as you search for the right answer, and you’ll have a greater likelihood of attaining the success you seek in marketing.