Journalist at Promodo
For over 6 years, I have been working as a journalist in the communications and marketing industry. I help brands communicate effectively through written content, engage with market experts, and create professional materials on topics related to business and marketing, sharing insights on working with marketing tools.
86% of companies already have in-house marketing resources. Yet nearly half of them still work with external partners, according to The In-House Barometer 2026.
Choosing between an agency and an in-house marketing team depends on your company's size, marketing needs, budget, and the expertise required to achieve your goals. The comparison shouldn't come down to an agency's monthly fee versus one marketer's salary. What matters is the total cost of building and maintaining a team, along with the resources each model provides.
In this article, we'll compare in-house and agencies, highlight the advantages of each approach, and help you decide which model makes the most sense for your business.
In-house marketing means having your own marketing team. These specialists are employed directly by your company and focus on its goals, products, and day-to-day needs.
A marketing agency is an external team that handles specific marketing activities or a broader range of services. Depending on your needs, this could include SEO, PPC, content, analytics, CRM, social media marketing, or a complete digital marketing strategy.
An agency can work as a contractor responsible for a specific service, a strategic partner, or an extension of your existing marketing team.
The difference is how your business accesses expertise, assigns responsibilities, and manages marketing activities.
The biggest advantage of an in-house team is its close connection to the business. Internal marketers work within the company every day, so they know the product better, can communicate more quickly, and give management direct control over the team's work.
An in-house marketer sees more than individual advertising campaigns or traffic reports. They understand why the company is changing its product range, which products are currently a priority, what's happening with sales, and what limitations other departments are facing.
At Promodo, we also look beyond individual marketing channels when working with clients. Specialists always work closely with a Customer Success Manager to understand the broader business context, including the client's goals, product, and internal processes.
This helps us make decisions based on the actual state of the business, without going through several layers of communication every time we need important information, as can sometimes happen with external contractors.
— Serhii Lomanenko, Head of Marketing at Promodo
Of course, that's the ideal scenario. In large companies with multiple departments, decision-making can also take quite a long time.
When marketers work within the same company, it's easier for them to coordinate with other departments.
For example, colleagues can check each other's calendars or know about upcoming vacations in advance. With external contractors, even a small clarification may take several hours. And as the scope of work and number of people involved grow, communication time increases accordingly.
An in-house team gives management direct control over the marketing team: set priorities, distribute workloads, change assignments, and monitor progress.
For some companies, this is particularly important. For example, when marketing is closely tied to commercial decisions, or management wants specialists consistently involved in internal discussions.
However, direct control doesn't automatically speed up decisions or make them more effective. You still need clear processes and people who can take ownership of their responsibilities.
So far, we've described an ideal situation: a company with well-established management, experienced specialists, and a team that's deeply involved with the product.
But building this kind of team requires a significant investment. Not every business can afford dedicated senior specialists, analysts, and experienced team leaders for every marketing function.
There are also ongoing expenses for recruitment, taxes, onboarding, training and professional development, specialized tools, vacations, sick leave, and employee replacement.
To manage these costs, businesses often reduce the number of roles rather than the amount of work. Instead of hiring several specialists with different areas of expertise, they look for one versatile marketer who can handle multiple responsibilities. This reduces the cost of building a team, but it may also limit the depth of expertise in individual areas.
The approach makes sense when marketing tasks don't require extensive specialization. However, if a company plans to scale significantly, work with large volumes of data, or develop several digital channels, one generalist may not have the required skills and capacity.
While in-house marketing involves building your own team, an agency gives you access to an established team with a range of expertise.
But an agency's value isn't simply that it has more people. What matters is the expertise your business can access, how quickly you can bring in the resources you need, and the capabilities that support the team's work.
When you work with an agency, you gain access not only to the specialists assigned to your project but also to a broader professional network within the agency.
Agency specialists communicate with one another, share experience, and use solutions developed by their colleagues.
When an agency develops a new tool, tests an approach, or launches a service, that knowledge is shared across teams. Specialists can then apply new solutions to their projects and offer clients opportunities they might not have considered.
At least, that's how we work at Promodo.
Subscriptions and maintenance costs for third-party marketing tools can require significant investment. Even when a company has the budget, maintaining a full set of tools for just a few tasks isn't always financially justified.
Working with an agency gives businesses access to its existing infrastructure. Agency specialists use the necessary platforms, analyze data, and turn their findings into actionable insights and recommendations.
For example:
.webp)
An internal marketing team develops deep knowledge of its own business, but it may lack experience and insights from outside the company.
One of the biggest advantages of working with an agency is the expertise it develops through projects across different industries, business needs, and challenges.
Agencies work with multiple clients simultaneously, so their specialists gain exposure to a wider range of market changes, approaches, and solutions.
Successful experience from one project can be adapted for another. Agencies can also provide access to solutions that would be difficult or time-consuming for clients to develop themselves.
For one of our large eCommerce clients, we developed a tool that automatically assigned products to the appropriate website filters. The project involved millions of products.
Three specialists and a team lead worked on the solution, which was hosted on the agency's server. The client provided a product feed; we processed it and returned the completed results.
The solution improved both user experience and SEO. Visitors could see fully populated filters, while search engine crawlers could index complete pages.
Building a similar solution internally would have required the company to involve its own developers and invest considerably more time.
— Ihor Hladkyi, SEO Team Lead at Promodo
With an in-house model, business growth often means starting another recruitment process. You need to open a position, find candidates, conduct interviews, onboard the new employee, and help them get up to speed.
With an agency, you can bring in additional expertise from an existing team.
For example, you might add another PPC specialist to scale advertising campaigns or involve an analyst to work with data. You can also rotate specialists on a project to explore new solutions and bring in a fresh perspective.
When a team works with the same product for a long time, certain decisions gradually become routine. People may continue following an established approach not because it's still the most effective, but simply because they're used to it.
An external team can challenge those assumptions. For example, an agency might notice that your company keeps investing in a channel out of habit, overlooks a potentially valuable audience, or measures performance using metrics that don't reflect marketing's actual contribution to the business.
When comparing in-house marketing with an agency, businesses often focus on two numbers: a marketer's salary and an agency's monthly fee. But this doesn't show the true cost of either model.
The cost of an internal team goes well beyond salaries. Several less obvious expenses contribute to the total cost of running marketing in-house:
These expenses can account for a substantial part of the marketing budget. They're also recurring costs. Businesses need to keep investing in their teams, tools, and processes.
And as marketing expands into new areas, the cost of supporting those activities grows as well.
Unlike maintaining an internal team, working with an agency means paying for a specific scope of work, agreed goals, and KPIs.
At the start of the partnership, both sides define the tasks, expected results, and required resources. The agency then plans the team's work, identifies suitable solutions, and works toward meeting the agreed objectives.
In other words, you're not simply paying for specialists' working hours. You're paying for their combined expertise, established methodology, and solutions developed through experience.
Another important consideration is consistent delivery. In-house teams, especially smaller ones, may need to postpone planned activities when urgent requests arise, or internal priorities change.
When work is delegated to an agency, the business can be more confident that the agreed activities will continue regardless of how internal resources are reassigned.
Imagine a company wants to develop its SEO, paid advertising, and analytics. Doing this effectively requires several different areas of expertise.
If you compare an agency's fee to the salary of just one marketer, you overlook differences in workload, the cost of additional specialists, the tools required, and the effort involved in managing everything.
A more useful comparison would be:
For the in-house model, start by identifying which specialists would be responsible for each direction. Then calculate the costs of hiring and employing them, the tools they'll need, and who will manage their work.
For the agency model, request a proposal covering the same scope of work. Find out which specialists will be involved, what's included in the fee, and which additional expenses your company will still need to cover.
Only then can you make a meaningful budget comparison. But even with those numbers, you should also evaluate how quickly each model can get started, the expertise available, and how easily you can scale your marketing activities.
An agency isn't necessarily cheaper than an in-house team. However, it can be more cost-effective when a business needs expertise in several areas but doesn't need to hire full-time specialists for each.
An agency can be a better fit when your company needs expertise that would be difficult or expensive to develop internally.
Consider working with an agency if:
In practice, businesses don't always have to choose between an agency and an in-house team. Many companies use a hybrid approach, combining their internal marketing resources with external expertise.
For example, an in-house team may handle marketing strategy, brand management, and day-to-day activities, while an agency handles specialized tasks such as SEO, PPC, or analytics.
Another option worth considering is marketing consulting.
In this model, an agency regularly brings in specialists, analysts, or PPC experts to review the in-house team's work, assess performance, and recommend next steps. The internal team remains responsible for implementation.
These partnerships are usually planned over a longer period, such as a year, with consulting sessions scheduled in advance.
Before deciding between an in-house team and an agency, answer these seven questions:
Both models have their strengths. An in-house team offers deep business knowledge, continuous involvement, and direct control. An agency provides access to specialists across different disciplines, professional tools, experience from other markets, and the flexibility to bring in additional resources when needed.
Ultimately, your company isn't just paying for marketers' time. You're investing in expertise, processes, and the ability to achieve your marketing goals. The best model is the one that delivers the results your business needs.
Journalist at Promodo
For over 6 years, I have been working as a journalist in the communications and marketing industry. I help brands communicate effectively through written content, engage with market experts, and create professional materials on topics related to business and marketing, sharing insights on working with marketing tools.
You may also like
Choose quality and trusted services to improve the presence of your company on the Internet, and feel free to contact our UK team if you have any questions.
Launching an online store is just the beginning. That’s time to think about Shopify blog SEO!
.avif)
Mastering Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising will help you transform your educational offerings from hidden gems to popular choices.
While X-Day is soon approaching, every online business should do its best to migrate to Google 4 Analytics (GA4) as soon as possible.
We at Promodo are ready to help you improve your performance across all digital marketing channels.
Get started
.svg){kind=logo}
