Agency and In-House Influencer Marketing: Pros and Cons

in Influencer Marketing

With brands poised to spend up to $15 billion on influencer marketing by 2022, many are faced with a key decision: manage influencer marketing in-house or hire an outside agency. Each has its pros and cons that should be taken into consideration based on the needs of your business and brand.

So, should you bring your influencer marketing in-house or hire an agency to help you manage it? There are pros and cons to both approaches.

Hiring an Influencer Marketing Agency: Cons

An outside agency may have challenges understanding your brand and customers; challenges that don’t exist with your in-house marketing.
Many established agencies require monthly minimum spends, so limited budgets can hamper a company’s ability to bring in the agency that has the most expertise working with influencers who understand the company’s brand.
An additional layer of players between marketing and the consumer may result in communications issues and misalignment and/or misunderstanding of goals.

Hiring an Influencer Marketing Agency: Pros

Agencies bring strategic expertise and tools that companies, particularly smaller ones or those new to influencer marketing, lack. These agencies already have established processes and protocols in place to effectively launch and manage campaigns, thereby allowing businesses to focus on other aspects of their marketing plans.
Influencer agencies have relationships with well-established influencers and their managers. These pre-existing relationships save companies the time and effort that would be involved in identifying and creating their own contact lists.
Agencies have a keen understanding and experience knowing which campaigns and influencers work best for various products, services, and campaigns. Agencies build their businesses on understanding influencers and brands and bring that understanding to managing campaigns for their clients.

Bringing Influencer Marketing In-House: Cons

A lack of expertise, influencer contacts, and an understanding of influencer management can result in ineffective or misaligned campaigns.
Companies that do not have or can’t afford a dedicated influencer team can struggle with identifying and utilizing the most effective influencers for their brands. In-house personnel may also lack the contacts and understanding of influencer marketing that’s essential to successfully create and launch campaigns.
Because the industry is relatively new, hiring an in-house influencer team can be expensive.

Influencer Marketing In-House: Pros

An in-house team with a dedicated influencer team understands their brand and ideal customers more than an outside agent may be able to. This understanding can lead to greater success in identifying the right influencers and creating stronger campaigns.
In-house influencer campaign creation may result in more long-term relationships as personnel build and develop their own curated roster of influencers.
An in-house team may allow for more flexibility when adapting and changing campaigns to meet market demands and trends.

Agency or In-House: You Need the Right Tools

Whether you’re working with an in-house team or using an influencer marketing agency, having the right tools is key. Understanding your customers, your brand, and your goals are instrumental in creating successful influencer campaigns.

And, adopting a hybrid approach to influencer management may offer the best of both worlds: allowing in-house personnel to combine industry and customer knowledge while using an agency’s strategic expertise to go even farther.

Ready to take your influencer marketing to the next level? Sideqik is an all-in-one influencer marketing platform to take you from discovery and campaign management and through to reporting.

Bio
Latest Posts

Nancy Rothman

Nancy is a passionate, results-driven marketing executive with more than a decade of experience in building robust integrated marketing programs for brands of all sizes, with specific expertise in the martech space. Prior to Sideqik, Nancy held roles at four successful martech startups, each of which received multiple series of fundraising and included two acquisitions. At CallRail, specifically, Nancy served as the director of marketing where she built the company’s brand and established it as a leader in its space. She also held roles at MeetEdgar, where she oversaw the entire sales and marketing practice, increasing the company's user base and annual recurring revenue, as well as PureCars, which was acquired by Raycom Media in 2015. As vice president of marketing for Sideqik, Nancy is responsible for developing and executing on the company's marketing strategy to drive overall business growth.