One common occurrence we often encounter is determining whether a business should invest in-house marketing vs agency support. Full disclosure, we’re an advertising agency in Sioux Falls, SD. Our goal is to help answer this question:
Should we hire someone in-house or outsource to a marketing agency?
Key Takeaways:
- The right choice comes from business goals and timing, not in-house vs agency alone
- Most marketing struggles stem from unclear strategy, not execution source
- Specialized work like SEO, paid media, analytics, and campaign video benefits from agency expertise
- A hybrid approach creates stronger alignment, faster execution, and better long-term growth
Which Marketing Method is Right For You?
It’s a fair question and one your business might be facing. It’s also an expensive one to get wrong. Many factors come into play when evaluating what’s best for your business.
After years of working with local businesses across multiple industries, Cannonball Digital has seen a clear pattern: most companies don’t struggle because they choose wrong. They struggle because they make decisions based on what’s worked in the past, previous experience with advertising agencies, or lack of knowledge about the types of services they need vs want.
Questions that help begin the conversation look like:
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Are campaigns slow to launch?
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Is ad spend inconsistent or unpredictable?
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Are leads coming in, but quality is off?
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Does marketing feel disconnected from sales?
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Are we guessing at what’s working?
This article gives you a practical guide to know what role to hire internally, what services to outsource, and when it makes the most sense for either.
Choosing a Direction Can Be Challenging
Hiring in-house feels safe. You get control, proximity, and someone who lives and breathes your business.
Outsourcing can feel risky. Do they know my industry? How often will we communicate? We’ve worked with an ad agency before, and it didn’t go well. And, a lot of times, it’s viewed as another line item on the budget. If you’re not sure where to get started, Cannonball Digital outlines practical steps to answer the tough questions you’re potentially facing.
The size of your business and growth plans is a good starting point. If you have one or a few folks on the marketing team, identify where they spend most of their time. Asking someone to handle internal marketing (posters, event coordination, social media management, presentations to the board) and also paid marketing efforts is a tough balancing act.
Evaluating the Cost of Hiring In-House vs Outsourcing
Next up for consideration is your overall marketing budget. Start with the cost analysis of hiring a new team member versus outsourcing. For example, if you need help with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), you need to hire someone with experience in technical audits, writing, and publishing.
If you’re a local or regional business selling a product or service, you’ll also need to be fluent in Google Business Profile optimization. Outsourcing might range from $1,000 per month up to $4,000 per month.
A new employee to manage these responsibilities will typically require a larger investment and not require a full 40 hours every week for one business.
But here’s the reality we see every day:
Most marketing failures aren’t caused by who does the work. They’re caused by when and why the decision was made.
In-House vs Agency Comparison
| Category | In-House Team | Marketing Agency |
|---|---|---|
| Cost Structure | Salary + benefits | Monthly retainer |
| Skill Depth | Limited specialties | Multi-disciplinary team |
| Speed | Slower scaling | Faster execution |
| Platform Expertise | Narrower focus | Broader experience |
| Scalability | Requires hiring | Adjustable scope |
| Strategic Perspective | Internal view | External insights |
SEO: Should It Be In-House or Outsourced?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the foundation for a really good marketing mix. Historically, it’s also one of the most unknown parts of marketing. Knowing the value of SEO, what to measure, and the amount of work for good SEO to create results can be hard. Add in all the new strategies and terms like AIO, GEO, LLMO, AEO, and it became even more of a dark box.
Technical SEO, content strategy, on-page optimization, and link building all require diligent tasks, and lots of them. Early in growth, most in-house hires don’t have the experience to cover all four effectively. Building out a new website landing page is not SEO. Well-structured pages with educational information are the simple version of what it takes to show up in search results and search engines like Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and more.
What we’ve seen work:
Outsource SEO strategy and execution to agencies that have multiple team members with experience in effectively managing technical SEO and content development.
Build internal content support for one-off landing pages, event pages, social and community event pages.
Working together to create short and long-term content plans that build the foundation for marketing campaigns like social media, email, video, and paid advertising campaigns.
Paid Digital Media
Media platforms and algorithms change constantly. Targeting opportunities are much deeper than you’d expect. Testing frameworks matter. Creative, targeting, bidding, and analytics must work together.
We regularly see businesses hire a junior marketer, hand them a budget, and hope for the best. One of the most common examples is on Meta (Facebook and Instagram). Companies hire someone with organic social media experience or minimal marketing experience. They post on the platform and boost the post versus using Meta’s technology to truly set up the best campaign objectives, targeting, and creative that lead to the best results.
Check out this blog for more on how to run successful media campaigns.
What we recommend:
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Outsource paid media if your budget supports running campaigns on multiple platforms like Google and Meta, just to name a few.
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Build goals for your business internally and share what KPIs look like with an advertising agency.
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Keep organic social media in-house and support with paid campaigns that are more trackable and reach a specific audience.
The biggest mistake we see: hiring for paid media and adding SEO, web development, internal marketing, and paid ads to their job description.
Video Production
Video is one of the most powerful tools businesses have to build trust with their audience. Video allows businesses to tell their story, what they believe in, and to bring their products and services to life. It can also be one of the easiest to overcomplicate.
Not all videos serve the same purpose, and treating them that way is where most teams go wrong. Organic social should be fun and entertaining. It can be shot with a phone and a simple lav microphone most of the time.
Paid media on most media platforms needs more polish. Most media platforms have rigid requirements for square, horizontal, and vertical videos to help you show up on all placements. Connected TV (OTT, CTV) provides great audience targeting and allows for additional placements outside of social media. Common Connected TV placements include YouTubeTV, Hulu, Roku and other streaming platforms.
Where Agencies Add the Most Value
Advertising agencies are best used when quality, strategy, and performance matter most.
This typically includes:
- Brand videos that define who you are and what you stand for
- High-performing paid media creative
- Website videos that clarify your value proposition
- Campaign videos tied to your business goals or KPIs
This type of video production helps your business with storytelling, strong visuals, and strategic messaging. The best video strategy happens when they’re repurposed across channels. For example, create a longer form video for your website, cut down into a 15 or 30 second video for paid media, chop those into a few vertical videos for organic social, add to your YouTube channel, and then post on your Google Business Profile.
Where In-House Video Wins
In-house video shines when frequency, authenticity, and speed matter more than polish. Highlighting employees, fun events, and interaction at your business are great opportunities to connect with your audience and potential customers. Creating consistent video content allows businesses to stay visible, relevant, and human.
Examples we see work especially well:
For service-based businesses:
- Short videos answering common customer questions
- Behind-the-scenes looks at how services are delivered
- Team spotlights that build familiarity and trust
- Educational clips explaining processes or timelines
For product-based businesses:
- Product demos and how-to videos
- Quick explainers showing how products solve real problems
- Comparisons and use-case videos
- Updates tied to new features or improvements
For all businesses:
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Values-driven content explaining why the company exists and how they help consumers
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Community involvement and local partnerships
- Founder or leadership perspectives on industry topics
- Social-first video that prioritizes connection over perfection
This kind of content works because it’s timely, honest, and repeatable. It gives your audience a reason to keep paying attention, engages with your brand in a fun way, and helps future buyers feel like they already know you.
The Strategic Advantage of Volume
Consistent video builds momentum. It keeps your brand top of mind and reinforces trust over time.
Trying to outsource all video often results in:
- Fewer videos
- Slower turnaround
- Content that feels overly produced and less relatable
Creating content pillars around experience, education and fun, paired with a content plan for easy execution and distribution often outperforms expensive production when it comes to ongoing engagement on organic social media.
The Balance That Works
The strongest approach we see is a clear split:
- Agency-led video for cornerstone assets and campaigns that live on your website and are placed on paid media campaigns
- In-house video for regular, relationship-building content distributed via organic social media channels
When each plays its role, video stops being a bottleneck and starts becoming a growth engine.
The mistake isn’t outsourcing video. The mistake is outsourcing everything.
Analytics and Data Intelligence
Analytics, or data intelligence, is the quiet backbone of every marketing decision. Clean and trackable data tells a story of how customers and prospects are interacting with content, your website and your Google Business Profile. Understanding what content drives action drives marketing strategy for organic social media, paid media, SEO, website content and overall messaging.
Most teams don’t realize their data isn’t tracking or clean until a 3rd party reviews their Google Analytics (GA4), CRM data or 1st party data. Owning and tracking your data is the foundation of all marketing efforts.
We consistently recommend:
- Outsourcing analytics setup and auditing
- Building internal reporting dashboards
- Using advertising agencies to translate data into decisions
If you don’t have the correct numbers and data, nothing else matters. A lot of wasted ad spend is a result of bad data.
The Hybrid Model Wins
The highest-performing businesses we work with don’t choose either/or. They bring in advertising agencies like Cannonball Digital to set up, clean up, and track analytics. We build data dashboards so our clients have all data from all platforms available all the time.
Once data intelligence is built, then decisions are made collectively. Most in-house marketing teams are so busy with so many tasks that foundational items like Google Analytics is an afterthought. Set up data tracking dashboards, make them accessible to clients, and then tell the data intelligence story that helps make better decisions.
Why “All In-House” Slows Growth
Hiring internally feels efficient. One salary. One person accountable. One team under your roof, at your office or boots on the ground.
But modern marketing isn’t one skill set.
SEO/AIO, paid media, video production, analytics, creative testing, tracking, platform changes and take specialized discipline not a “one-size-fits-all” approach.
Expecting one internal hire (or even a small team) to master all of them usually leads to one of three outcomes:
- Execution becomes shallow
- Campaigns move slowly
- Results plateau
Sales don’t stall because effort is low. They stall because leverage is low.
Why “All Agency” Isn’t the Answer Either
On the flip side, outsourcing everything can create distance and disconnection.
Agencies don’t sit in your sales meetings. They don’t hear customer objections daily. They don’t live inside your culture. Without internal ownership, marketing can drift away from real-world conversations that close deals.
Sales improve when marketing and internal knowledge are tightly aligned. Outsourcing everything means misalignment and get get too expensive depending on the size of your business.
The Question That Simplifies Everything
Instead of asking:
- “Should we hire someone for our internal team or outsource to an advertising agency?”
Ask this:
- “What outcome do we need next, and how much does it cost if we get it wrong?”
When you use the framework provided, decisions become clearer and more actionable.
Summary from Cannonball Digital
Hiring decisions aren’t about ego or ownership. They’re about creating the right momentum.
The goal shouldn’t be to build the biggest marketing team, but to build the most effective marketing system. The right balance of in-house vs agency provides clarity, confidence, speed, and measurable growth.
If you want help pressure-testing your current setup, we’re always happy to talk it through. We always start with a no obligation discovery call to learn about your business goals, your audience and help identify your growth opportunities with you.
Not as salespeople, but as partners who’ve seen what actually works.