Since 2020, we began to see more frequently that some companies left their marketing agencies to start working with internal teams and what in theory was a good idea, over the months for some it has become a serious problem. .
Companies of all kinds are choosing to create an internal marketing team or what they call an “Internal Agency” to carry out all marketing activities but in charge of its employees.
There may be many reasons for this decision, but the most common have to do with budgets and delivery times, since from the perspective of companies, agencies are very expensive and take a long time to deliver the work, so the idea of solving working with an internal team seems like a good option.
An advantage of this internal agency model is that the team members are already steeped in the topic and the terminology of the products or services, which greatly facilitates the process at the beginning and throughout the project.
facing reality
Personally, I have documented 12 cases of companies that opted for this model, of which 10 of them returned to hiring external agencies in less than 18 months, and the remaining two continue with that model, although they have had to make several changes and adjustments to be able to get ahead.
Virtually all companies that opt for an internal agency believe that they need few staff to carry out the work, largely due to the lack of understanding of the structure of an agency and what each area does.
When the argument is for budget, companies start by hiring few staff and believe that as they go along they will be able to add new members as needed, the problem with this is that if there are not enough people at the outset, logically the existing members will they saturate and being saturated they don’t have time to help or train new members, because they either do the work or train the new ones.
This is followed by a problem with the hiring of new personnel, because in theory the internal team would have to take charge of finding the new members that will come to reinforce the team, but once again the saturation prevents an adequate job from being done.
In general, marketing agencies or digital agencies have an arsenal of software and utilities of different types to carry out their work, from planning, content generation or reporting. It is common that internal agencies do not have any of this, because it was not considered from the beginning and they are expenses that are not contemplated on a day-to-day basis. This is one of the items that raises the prices of internal teams the most, because in external agencies licenses are paid as an agency, where you have a special price for the volume of clients you have, but when you hire for a single company logically the prices are higher.
Another common problem that happens with internal teams has to do with absenteeism and more so now with the pandemic. In an external agency, its own structure is prepared so that if a member is missing, someone else can do the work and deliver it in a timely manner; With internal teams, it is very difficult to achieve this, because each member has their workload and if they do someone else’s, they run the risk of not finishing their own.
Something that can be questionable and quite debatable has to do with creativity, since it is common for internal teams to get stuck and stop proposing new ideas, because their focus is always on the same product or service. In an external agency, having several accounts allows new ideas to be generated and even members of other accounts contribute ideas or do the work of critics. If we add to all this that in an external agency there are creative directors, account managers, Traffickers and in general there are several positions that are in charge of reviewing and evaluating creativity, it is very rare to find these positions in an internal team. since having a single client they do not consider it necessary.
In the companies that I have seen try this internal option, as the months go by, most of them end up paying the same or even more than what they paid to an external agency, due to all the factors that they do not consider from the beginning, from the specialization of each of the members and having to add more people to the team, until the use of the correct tools that generate additional costs.
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