Should you hire an Agency or a Marketing Ops Manager?

As organizations strive to become fully digital, they’re bumping up against the overwhelming landscape of MarTech and how it can boost their marketing performance. And while marketers know their marketing team structure needs an overhaul, many are struggling to escape the technology rodeo and carry out the new order of task operations.

It turns out the looming question remains even for those who have already succeeded in their MarTech adoption - “Should we bring in a MarTech partner, invest in new hires or redeploy existing staff internally to do the work?” Today we answer this question within the orbit of Inbound Marketing.

Assessing the need for Inbound Growth help

Most blog articles that rank high on this matter are usually just focused on a pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages approach. But we believe that more important than an informed decision is knowing beforehand if and when you need to bring it to the table. 

Anticipating the need to have some extra muscle to get better results on Inbound Growth is actually something you can do more or less quickly by answering these 8 diagnostic questions we have set up for you:

1. Are your current marketing initiatives not driving enough organic website traffic?
   
2. Do you have a fairly high percentage of website visitors that aren’t converting into leads?
   
   
3. Do you feel lost about which industry-relevant keywords your website should rank for?
   
   
4. Are your email marketing campaigns not generating enough sales opportunities?
   
   
5. Does your content marketing team not really know who they are writing content for?
   
   
6. Do you naively believe every website visitor is there to buy your product or service?
   
   
7. Do you think revenue goals are something for sales to worry about?
   
   
8. You have no idea how to power an A/B testing methodology with Marketing Analytics?
   ?

Now the diagnosis: if more than one of your answers has shown that your business scalability is flawed, maybe it’s time to start considering some extra help - either by strengthening your in house marketing team with a Marketing Operations Manager or by hiring an Inbound Marketing Agency.

Agency vs In-House Inbound Marketing

If the struggle is real, now is the time to make the best possible decision regarding who’s going to get things done. That’s why we built this table to help you visualize the key points that you can't go without knowing:

Don't get caught by the decision dilemma

MarTech adoption could be a permanent move up the innovation curve but, against all the odds, the 2022 Marketing Technology Survey Insights says that marketers utilize just 42% of their MarTech stack capabilities today, as compared to 58% in 2020.  

We may not know the cause, but this derail progress in MarTech utilization seems to be a global symptom that needs to be fixed. If you’re part of the statistics and feel that your MarTech end-users have no hands to grasp, ask an agency to step in, count the dollars in your wallet and evaluate how far you can go with them. In fact, you might be surprised to hear that most Inbound Marketing agencies will consult you about what you can do with the budget that you have. 

On the other hand, if you don’t have a budget challenge to tackle or if your company is part of an over-complex industry, maybe your most suitable option is to hire and build out an internal Inbound Marketing team - in which the Marketing Operations Manager will be a central piece, but not the only one. 

Sometimes it may also be that you don't really have to make a choice, because you’ll be able to get the right combination of marketing expertise by bringing together the facets of in-house versus outsourcing to meet production plans and accomplish marketing goals - that's what most big companies are already doing and they're rocking it! In any case, never lose sight of the goal of ensuring your investment in marketing automation softwares return value, unlock data and enable growth.