In-housing your marketing — and why you need an external marketing team (too)

In recent years, plenty of large organizations have built multi-disciplined in-house marketing teams — to reduce outside spending, tighten control over communications, or centralize the function.

Many of these departments operate like ad agencies: designers, production managers, PR professionals, media buyers and writers, all reporting into a communications or marketing director.

If you’ve made that move, you’ve done the analysis: new salaries and benefits are at least partially offset by what you were spending on agencies and consultants. And beyond cost, you get to build the team to your specifications, grow institutional knowledge, and respond quickly to the unpredictable needs of your internal ‘clients.’

But even the most capable in-house team will always benefit from an outside perspective.

Yes, we’re biased. But we’re not wrong.

Stop treating internal versus external as either/or. Each gives you something different. Here’s how.

4 advantages external marketing teams have

1. Reality checks are unbiased

An in-house team can be too close to the organization to see the forest for the trees. You’re proud of where you work — but unchecked, that pride produces creative that’s navel-gazing instead of audience-focused.

It’s often not the team’s fault. In most large organizations, several voices weigh in on the creative, and many of them aren’t marketers (more on that in a sec).

They’re also teammates you pass in the hall, so there’s a natural motivation to keep them happy. As a result, in-house teams drift toward work they know will get approved internally instead of work powered by audience insight.

Good external partners prevent that. We're better positioned to ask tough questions. We start with research that guides the creative and tells us exactly what motivates your audience. And when internal pressure builds, we’re the sober reminder that you’re not advertising to yourselves. Speaking of which…

2. Internal audience persuasion

Your organization is filled with subject matter experts. FILLED with them. 

Imagine a designer giving your head of finance tips on balancing the books. But somehow, marketing is a topic everyone feels qualified to arbitrate — not just as contributors to the thinking (where they bring real value), but as judges of the strategy and the creative. 

I know this firsthand. In-house, my expertise got questioned constantly by people entirely outside marketing. When I advised that same organization from the agency side, those same people engaged completely differently.

The expertise of internal teams is often overlooked.

One of the challenges for internal teams is that their expertise is often overlooked by their peers. Is that fair? No. But in any industry, internal marketing expertise gets discounted precisely because it’s internal.

That’s where an outside expert helps. We work hand in glove with in-house teams so that when the work goes to a broader group, it’s a united front. And our endorsement — in the room, shoulder-to-shoulder — helps build the  case for adoption among internal skeptics (even when we're simply endorsing your team's work).

3. Innovation isn’t a luxury (at least, not for Show and Tell)

Not every agency can make this claim: “innovation” isn’t a value among a list in our strategic plan. It’s our DNA. 

New media, new tech, new creative trends — we’re trying something unproven most weeks, across a dozen clients, because that’s how we bring you what’s next.

Most internal marketing departments are built to execute. And they execute well. They can do what most agencies are doing right now. 

But can they do what that agency will be doing next month? Next year? That takes a different kind of investment: time to experiment, budget to fail, and people whose job is to chase what hasn’t been proven yet.

Those investments are hard to get approved in a large organization because they don’t contribute to today’s bottom line. And without a deliberate devotion to innovation from your internal team, its effectiveness quietly erodes. Maybe not next quarter, but over the long term? Absolutely.

We’ve made that investment in our team. We have a dedicated AI and Innovation department entirely devoted to building our capacity for what’s coming, so we can help clients adapt when ‘what’s coming’ arrives. 

Often, our clients can’t afford to do this. We, on the other hand, can’t afford not to. 

4. Fresh perspective from talent with diverse experience

We’ve partnered with in-house marketing teams to rebrand several organizations (a few of them more than once). We always tell them the task ahead is daunting — and that it’s an opportunity most marketers get only a handful of times in a career.

Unless, of course, they’re agency-side. 

Internal teams face a rebrand only as often as their organization undertakes one — which is hopefully rare. Agencies might take on several in a year. 

(Yours is our favourite, we promise.)

Those reps makes us very, very good at leading complex, heavily scrutinized projects. The kind you can’t afford to get wrong, because your whole community is watching. 

It also attracts a particular kind of person: someone who thrives on debate, who's undaunted by the unfamiliar, who relishes a bit of chaos. Useful traits in a rebrand.

Large organizations, by contrast, tend to be measured, cautious and bureaucratic. And that check-and-balance (between the agency and client-side approaches) is a match made in heaven for these kinds of engagements.

The hallmarks of a great internal/external marketing model

If you’ve invested in an internal team, you’re going to develop much of your marketing in-house. But some projects your team won’t have the experience — or the hours — to deliver. By also partnering with a team outside your organization, you really can have it all.

An agency that genuinely enhances your work should meet a few criteria:

• A long-term relationship — so the agency knows and respects your brand even as it finds new ways to express it.
• A team-player instinct — navigating your processes, leaning on your team’s knowledge, and still challenging assumptions.
• No territorialism — it should welcome what your internal team brings and build on it.

Every engagement we’d call our best has looked something like that.

Case in point: A winning relationship with UWIN

A great example is our work with the University of Winnipeg. They engaged Show and Tell to develop a new brand position, expressed in institutional marketing and recruitment campaign materials. Following a thorough consultative program — designed and administered by the agency — the UWIN positioning was launched to tremendous support in and outside the university community.

Show and Tell took the reins on the initial process, setting the direction for the campaign’s tone, look, and feel. But once that was established, the university’s internal marketing team was more than capable of running point.

Compare these two billboards: one developed by our team, the other by theirs. Can you tell which team did which?

Exactly.*

A great external partner respects the capabilities of your in-house team, and sets them up for success once their engagement is over. Some agencies see your team as a threat. But we think the relationship gives us the freedom to focus where we bring the most value:

• Big ideas translated into tools and guidelines your team can run with
• Senior creative talent (without the full-time senior salary)
• Experience and methodology to guide high-level initiatives
• Pushing the envelope while respecting your brand and the scope
• Investing in mastering leading- and bleeding-edge technology, early

• Helping you sell novel ideas to your most skeptical stakeholders

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We like meeting new, extended team members. If you’d like to explore about how we’d work with your folks, reach out. 

* Credit where credit's due: Bottom image produced by and used with permission from the University of Winnipeg. Nice job, friends.