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.