Outsourcing x insourcing digital marketing

    Whenever a company faces a task that is away from their core purpose they should ask themselves whether is worthy to invest and develop those capabilities in-house or just outsource the production. Digital marketing is a great example of that, because several retailers are now investing in ads in social media but do not have enough scale to maintain a full time employee focused on that. On the other hand, hiring an agency to take care of all your posts can be quite expensive. So, what are the factors one should consider when facing this kind of issue?

    Below, there are some of the pros of each type of service:

• Insourcing pros
• More brand focused 
• Easier to align objectives with sales and inventory teams 
• Flexible marketing plan, can easily adjust priorities as they shift   
• Cheaper for medium to long term tasks 
• Outsourcing pros
• Pay for delivered content, not employees
• Does not consume time hiring or training employees
• Agencies can leverage work from previous contracts and deliver a better quality work in a shorter period of time
• Can be cheaper if focused in a one off project

    As we can see, both models have their advantages, thus executives need to evaluate the amount/frequency of work, marketing budget and purpose of the campaign before taking such a decision. Probably the best answer for that is to have a hybrid model, where the company insource routine activities and outsource very specific and one-off projects.

Source: https://www.cose.org/en/Mind-Your-Business/Business-Growth/Insourcing-vs-Outsourcing-Digital-Marketing