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Whether you’re a bootstrapped startup or a venture-backed scale-up, figuring out the right growth marketing approach is crucial for hitting your business goals. Should you build an in-house team or outsource to an agency? The answer depends on factors like your industry, funding situation, bandwidth, and objectives. Let’s look at some key considerations for different company stages.

Bootstrapped Startups

In the earliest lean days, bootstrapped founders often handle growth efforts themselves out of necessity. With limited resources, it makes sense to own digital marketing, content creation, paid acquisition, and analytics in-house. The downside is it takes you away from product development. As you gain traction, you may hire a first growth hire or start to work alongside some smaller growth marketing agencies.

Seed/Pre-Series A

With a little outside capital, it becomes more feasible to engage affordable growth marketing contractors, a small boutique agency, or even hire your first growth marketing lead. An external team brings expertise without the overhead of a full-time hire. A consideration for agencies that they will lack the same product intimacy as having a dedicated in-house lead. Many seed startups keep growth marketing functions, such as SEO and content marketing, in-house to build a foundation for future growth activities.

Series A and Beyond

Once scaling up, it’s typical to build out an internal growth team to drive performance marketing, SEO, marketing ops, and more high-leverage growth activities. You have the funding to hire experienced growth marketers aligned with the company full-time. At this stage, companies often maintain an agency on flexible retainer for augmenting capabilities like design, development, analytics, paid media, marketing automation, or whatever gaps they may need to fill without dedicating headcount.

Enterprise

Larger, established companies tend to have sizable in-house marketing teams handling strategy, operations, and execution. That said, they still frequently work with agencies for an outside perspective, niche expertise (ex: industries or channels), staffing flexibility, and access to agency’s tools/data. The mix of in-house vs. outsourced can ebb and flow based on needs.

A Blended Approach

No matter your company’s stage, the decision should factor your goals, budgets, timelines, and team’s current skills. In-house provides more control but upfront costs. Agencies reduce overhead while adding specialized talent. Often, a blended approach works best by keeping foundational growth functions internal while leveraging flexible agency support.

About Northcast

Northcast is a boutique marketing services and consulting firm specializing in digital marketing, growth marketing and website development. The team at Northcast values the balance between short-term project goals and long-term vision, striving to be a dependable marketing partner. Want to schedule a call with us? Fill out our form to get started.

For any business, driving sales and revenue growth requires finding and capturing demand for your products or services. This involves a combination of demand generation activities that put your brand in front of new audiences, and demand capture efforts to convert interest into leads and sales. In today’s digital landscape, effective demand generation and capture requires thoughtful coordination of paid media and owned channels.

On the demand generation side, paid media like social ads, SEM, and display advertising enable you to precisely target your ideal customer profile (ICP) and get your brand and offerings in front of those most likely to have interest and intent. These outbound channels send traffic to your owned properties (i.e. your website, marketplace, etc), where inbound efforts take over to nurture interest into leads and sales.

Demand Generation

When using paid media for demand generation, focus on:

• Identifying your ICP – Compile demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data on existing customers to hone in on common attributes of those most likely to buy from you. Target ads precisely to this profile.
• Driving traffic to key landing pages – Send paid traffic to targeted landing pages that speak directly to the intended audience and move them towards conversion.
• Testing and optimizing campaigns – Continuously test ad creative, messaging, landing page design, calls-to-action, and target audience parameters. Iterate based on performance data.
• Expanding reach and frequency – Scale up high-performing ads and target similar audiences to expand reach. Increase frequency to desired levels based on sales cycle length.

Demand Capture

When using paid media to capture demand, focus on:

• Compelling content – Blog posts, guides, video, and other content should address pain points and customer needs focused on moving visitors through the sales funnel.
• Clear calls-to-action – Calls-to-action on pages and content should have a singular purpose and clearly direct visitors to take next steps.
• Reduced friction – Eliminate any friction in capture forms, checkouts, and other conversion processes. More steps and fields equal lower conversions.
• Lead nurturing – Have automated email nurture sequences in place to continue engagement with prospects who are not yet sales-ready.
• Site optimization – Utilize on-site analytics to identify and eliminate website friction points, technical issues, or confusing user flows. Continuously test and iterate.

By coordinating paid media and inbound efforts, you can increase both the quantity and quality of traffic to your site. Paid ads broaden your audience reach, while conversion-focused inbound activities capture and nurture qualified leads over time. Allocate budget and resources across both, regularly assess performance, and shift focus as needed to balance demand generation and capture. With testing and optimization, you can hone in on the right mix to drive sales growth.

Ready to work with a partner that can help you find the right balance of continuously generating demand while increasing your inbound leads? Request a call from Northcast to see if we can help accelerate your revenue through strategic growth marketing.