If you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re trying to decide whether you should do inbound marketing with HubSpot direct, or partner with a HubSpot agency to do it for you.
In making this decision, there are some important areas you need to consider. In this article, I’ll run through some of the key areas, offering pros and cons of both routes.
Ultimately, it depends on the current scale of your in-house operation, and the aspirations you have with HubSpot.
First up…
What does it take to be an effective HubSpot inbound marketing team?
Getting inbound marketing right requires a deep understanding of audience habits and behaviour. This is key to the creation and distribution of relevant and exciting content that will attract new leads to your business.
Beyond this, an effective inbound marketing team needs to understand the strategy and processes that underpin every aspect of the process, from content creation, blog writing, social promotion, SEO, keywords, and PR.
Efficiency and consistency are also vital to being successful with inbound marketing and HubSpot. Getting this right often requires a familiarity with many important tools that will help you write, design, create, organise, monitor and analyse within the software to maintain a high quantity and quality of content that consistently performs well in search engines.
Okay, so now it’s time to way up the best way to get to this point.
Let’s talk…
Time & money
Ultimately this is what this decision-making process boils down to. If partnering with a HubSpot agency will save you time and money without a reduction in standards, then the proposition is an appealing one. If it’s costlier, then what extra is the HubSpot agency offering, and is it worth it?
Generally speaking, here’s the lay of the land…
In-house
Going it alone, and getting it right with HubSpot, requires a dedicated in-house team of marketers to cover all the bases.
More than likely, (depending on the scale of your business) you’ll need a marketing manager, a marketing executive, plus any number of marketing assistants to cover the required content and social aspects of the process.
If you don’t already have in-house marketers working for you who’d be able to take on the might of this process, in all, this could run you anywhere between £70,000 to £90,000 annually in wages alone.
HubSpot Agency
The cost of acquiring a HubSpot agency can vary depending on how fast you want to reach your goals and how much growth you’re looking to achieve in a given period of time. However, the average price will more than likely cost you far less than hiring or training your own team to work in-house.
By partnering with a HubSpot agency, you’ll essentially be hiring a team comprising of inbound marketing specialists, digital marketers and strategists, web designers, trained SEO copywriters and executives, account handlers and, depending on the agency (wink wink nudge nudge), a fully-fledged creative production studio that specialises in film, animation, 360 video and virtual reality experiences.
If you do the sums, the saving is potentially huge.
But, I hear you say…
What about ROI?
Well, the ROI from a HubSpot agency is normally fast in effect. The expertise they boast will definitely come into play, especially in comparison to the potentially lengthy period of time it could take in-house marketers to learn the ins and outs of the HubSpot software. With an agency on hand to guide you through, this learning process is far quicker and far more effective.
Also, most agencies will have something to prove, and with the total transparency offered through the HubSpot CRM, they’ll be eager to show you exactly where the money’s going, and exactly where it’s working for you.
If it isn’t, let them go. But, if you do…
Here’s what you can expect from a HubSpot agency:
Depending on your needs and available resources…
- A large team of specialists working for you
- Full dedication in maximising your marketing ROI
- Fast turnaround on inbound marketing campaigns
- Audience research and persona building
- Creative concept development for your campaigns
- Reporting and measurement of marketing efforts
- Consistent dialogue to ensure everything is going in the direction you want
- More time to do what you do best, with full marketing peace of mind
Ultimately, although there are several downsides to going it alone, it can be the right thing to do if you have all your ducks in a row already. However, the time it’ll take for your team to learn and understand the many tools that HubSpot offers will be costly if that isn’t the case. Also, there’s no telling what mistakes will be made along the way without an expert on hand to guide you, and these could come to affect you further down the line. Ultimately it may prove to distract you from your prior focus, and if the sums work out in your favour, bringing in professionals in this area could pay off much sooner, and much bigger.
If you’re interested in finding out more about what to expect from a partnership with a HubSpot agency, give us a call and chat with one of our HubSpot experts.