Standing Up a Marketing Team - Agency vs. In-House

With last week's interest rate cut in the US, it remains to be seen whether growth budgets rebound to anywhere near previous levels when the cost of money was cheaper. In the meantime, SaaS leaders still have audiences to engage, and growth goals to hit. 

If that responsibility falls to you and you are trying to decide how to build out your marketing team, and you are expected to do more, with less - this note is for you. 

We empathize with your need to get moving quickly and to demonstrate ROI, however, there is considerable risk for your Startup and likely your job by putting the cart in front of the horse and making the wrong decision. 

MARKETING TEAM - Build or Buy?

Let’s build it! 

It can be very challenging, and pricey, to get a unicorn that can do it all; I've met a few and they are worth their weight in gold. More often you'll need to hire a strategic leader, a digital marketer (SEO + SEM), and a designer, and you're still left needing a Marketing Operations + Data expert, a Videographer, a Web Developer, and potentially a Content Writer. And we haven't even touched the media spend that will be necessary to scale, the tech stack, nor Sales yet. 

As hiring a full marketing team can easily surpass $500K annually (see below for a basic team), it’s clear why early-stage Startups often choose to work with a marketing agency. Couple that with high turnover in SaaS, the in-house route is often effort- and cost-prohibitive, but does often start to make sense once you're actively engaging your audience across multiple channels with significant marketing spend (>$100K/mo.) as what you’re paying an agency begins to approach the cost of an internal team.

*Salary data from Indeed

Let’s buy it!  

Agencies are also not cheap, but you get what you pay for and they do save you from considerable time required to hire, train and manage, and insulate you from churn. They also show up Day 1 with extensive expertise and you will speed up time to results by finding an agency that knows your target audience well, and who will take the time to go deep and truly understand their jobs-to-be-done, their challenges, their goals, and the problem your solution solves for. 

Working with your agency partner to set crystal clear goals and to bi-directionally manage expectations will go a long way towards achieving your growth objectives. 

You'll also want to get a clear understanding of how many accounts your agency team is managing and thus how much direct attention you are getting. Slow response times, or forgotten details during your initial conversations make it clear that you're talking to a volume shop looking to close as many new clients as possible, vs. a partner that is focused on you and your goals. 

We highly recommend checking out our guide for Choosing the Right B2B Agency For You, and also asking a prospective agency partner how they incorporate you and your team’s knowledge into the feedback loop as messaging, content, and creative are deployed and results come in. You will always be closer to your solution, and to your audience, and you, more than anyone, should be able to detect a BS artist selling you (and your audience by extension) a silver bullet. Does their plan involve bribes to incentivize apathy to action, or does it build genuine brand affinity and organic interest? Often the flashier the packaging the more vapid the substance, and quality will always trump quantity. 

Choose carefully here, especially if they want to lock you into a long-term contract with no out. 

Hybrid 

Find a great Growth leader, and entrust them with finding an agency partner to act as an extension of the team, and to execute your chosen strategy. The hybrid option is perhaps the best option of the three if you're looking to move quickly. Most B2B veterans will have existing relationships with preferred partners with proven track records. Established trust and rapport ensures they know what the agency partner is capable of and will allow them to both push for the best team, and hold the agency accountable to results in ways others cannot. 

A good indicator of a great potential Growth leader will be how well they can articulate their plan to engage your Total Addressable Market (TAM) in a way that drives efficient, and effective awareness, engagement, and opportunities from Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) accounts, and is optimized toward qualitative data, not quantitative. You can assist with their focus on quality by ensuring your marketing team’s North Star Metric (main goal) is a conversation, demo, or free trail, at a minimum, if not closed-won deals. Incorporating Lifetime Value to Cost of Acquisition (LTV:CAC) data into financial modeling will help keep efficiency at the forefront of budget allocation across channels. 

Speaking of budget, be mindful not to hamstring your new Growth Leader's content or paid media budget as they will need to have the resources to fully execute their strategy across the length of the buyer's journey, as well as across different marketing channels such as paid search, paid social, etc. While $5K per month can get a paid media program started, we recommend you plan for at least $10K per month to enable discoverability as well as optimization towards the campaigns and channels driving quality meetings. For the best reach and engagement, marketing programs should be considered an ecosystem and should be designed so growth does not overly rely on any one channel or platform for any aspect of the buyer’s journey. Ensuring your marketing team has sufficient budget for video, or for in-person audience activation will also accelerate performance. 

Marketing Team – Agency vs In-House

In conclusion, depending on your available budget, existing in-house expertise, and how aggressive the growth goals you are accountable to are, each of the above options could make sense. Just make sure your chosen route takes a quality-over-quantity approach that is customer centric, builds trust, and seeks to form (depending on the solution and context) brand affinity and/or relationships that last. Any other route and you will be building a house of cards.  

 If you would like to talk through your company’s specific goals and discuss the best mix of options, LaunchWave is here as a resource.