How to Strategically Plan For a Guerrilla or Duct Tape Marketing

There are simply two routes available for businesses when it comes to investing in digital marketing services – In House Marketing and Digital Marketing Outsourcing. On one hand, In-House Marketing is any marketing initiative that is not outsourced to a third party. On the other hand, digital marketing is the creation and dissemination of content.

In essence, you can achieve it through your site, blog articles, digital online channels, landing pages, social media, email, and mobile apps — and the promotion of that content using a variety of strategies. Like across paid, earned, and owned digital channels. That said, below is a video tutorial by Neil Patel about digital marketing tools to use without a team.

Other digital marketing tools include SEO, SEM, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, content syndication, text messages, etc.

What Does In House Marketing Entail?

Technically, In House Marketing, or rather, In-House Marketing is any initiative that is not in any regard for outsourcing to a third-party marketing service solutions delivery. As a matter of fact, in small businesses — or startups so to say — in-house marketing is sometimes referred to as guerilla marketing or duct tape marketing, if I may add.

In-house marketing means that the marketing activities of a company are handled by employees of the company. Perse, only a few external individuals or organizations are involved in the marketing processes as of today. Sometimes companies decide to build an in-house marketing team but want to replicate the agency model.

And as such, they establish the so-called in-house ad agency to work for them. Of course, here’s the thing; if you had to master the role of some if not all the marketing tools, you would be able to run a marketing campaign quite effectively. Whilst, avoiding spending weeks and weeks figuring it all out.

Some of these key options include:

The in-house marketing team and ad agency collaboration
Using the company’s in-house marketing team for everything
Using AI marketing tools to automate your overall ads strategy
Consulting professional marketers to come up with the best plan
Hiring an ads agency to work on your marketing campaigns

A research report from the Society of Digital Agencies found that there is a big trend toward producing In House Marketing. A lot of Companies are not hiring agencies anymore. They have plenty of reasons to do so.

But, instead of highlighting only one side, we want to give you a real comparison between the three options. If you are faced with the decision of choosing one of them and unsure about it, just let us help you for free.

Apart from your individual situation, we can give you objective reasons that will help you to make a decision. Examples of in-house ad agencies are Content Factory by Coca-Cola, BBC Creative by BBC, and Yellow Tag Productions by Best Buy.

The Main In House Marketing Advantages

At all costs, you’ll probably notice that; almost all the marketing tools designer’s mission is to make the jobs of any in-house marketing teams easier. May it be internal or external. They remove the mundane tasks and allow the team to focus on big-picture projects.

On one side, we’re all living in the world of social media — where management is the key. On the other side, everybody knows the difficulty of managing several different social media accounts. For instance, as a web business, you want a presence on all the pertinent channels. But, without all the hard work that comes with it, right?

It seems like you need to be online all day out — burning as much fuel as you can just to stay competitive. As well as to keep up with the posting schedule, conversations with clients, and other tasks. With that in mind, below are more benefits of using an in-house marketing strategy.

Taskforce Visualization

Hereby, I am talking about a deep understanding of either the overall brand or the main product. A big plus for in-housing is that the team is already familiar with the company’s product, philosophy, and culture.

Ultimately, a serious team is one that easily embeds into the company — has deep know-how of the brand, culture, product, and internal affairs. Therefore, they’re able to easily determine which approaches work best for the company. Your team knows best — whether it’s the most fitting topics to write about, the best keywords to use, etc.

Or even the most accurate ways to portray your target group! Although, forthwith, an outside agency will still have a briefing about your company’s goals and the topic of your campaign — in its first hand in order to relate fully with its undertaking. But, external teams still won’t be as connected to the company’s philosophy as your home team will be.

Teamforce Dedication

Because your marketing team knows your company like the backs of their hands and works exclusively for your company, they put much more dedication into their work. Your company’s fortune is also their fortune, after all.

Dedication and interest in your work are extra boosts to your team members’ motivation, which you can only benefit from. Working as a team to achieve your goals day after day can really tie people together. Therefore, relevant marketing topics can be easily discussed, and everyone on the team is engaged since they all want to move forward.

So, creating a good team spirit can positively affect your team’s results. Equally important, another main benefit of using an in-house marketing plan is that; it offers a whole manner of useful toolkit features — that’s if your teamforce can only get the best of them all. As a result, in terms of their key features, these tools are quite so useful.

Including scheduling posts, manning or running accounts, etc. Eventually, or even a dashboard that displays all your social profile accounts in one place. With such tools, whether you want to automatically optimize social media ad campaigns or design graphics for your website, you have some great options.

Fast Communication

Oftentimes, an in-house team will provide you with much faster communication paths. Simply, because you’re all working together in the same place. Even if you have remote workers on your team, you can at least notify them quickly, and expect a fast response time. Bearing in mind, working with an advertising agency can be quite demanding at times.

For example, it requires you — a business owner or its marketer — to schedule meetings with several persons at once which can be quite difficult. Fortunately, if you are using a Collaboration Platform like Slack, you can easily invite the agency employees to its communications tool to improve these communication workflows.

Having a direct and fast communication channel and collaboration tool allows you to set up and run campaigns quicker. You’ll also be able to respond to upcoming marketing trends more flexibly.

The Main In House Marketing Disadvantages

Here’s something that could be a little dreary for some people: Team members only get to focus on one single area, which they’ll stick to for a very long time. In general, there are positive and negative routines.

On one hand, Positive Routines can help employees to be self-confident about their work, speed up decision processes and ensure consistency. On the other hand, Negative Routines can result in being less creative, sticking to bad habits, and missing the big picture. Especially, handling the negative routines is an important factor.

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That’s if you come to think about hiring an in-house marketing team. If you hire an agency to do the marketing job for you, their advantage over an in-house team is that they have a lot of marketing experience. Not only in one field but in many different kinds of companies. They’re probably already used to having a client from a branch similar to yours.

And therefore, they know how to create the best strategies for your company. Let’s consider other downsides of In House Marketing that you should know as you start.

Less HR Flexibility

The advantage of an agency is that you can quickly fire them if their work doesn’t pay off. You can also fire an employee but a marketing team is built having a long-term strategy in mind. If the cooperation doesn’t work out, you need to restructure the team and adjust the strategy.

Before deciding on building in-house marketing, you should also calculate the total cost that comes with it. Moreover, it takes much longer to onboard new members and to explain how things work. Thus, this’s something that you shouldn’t be too casual about. Especially, if you have many complex processes and different manual guides to get things done.

Inadequate Resources

To produce high-quality marketing content and to run outstanding advertising campaigns, you need many experts. When you don’t have the talent inside your company, you have to hire an ad agency. There are only a few people in the world who are the best at what they do.

Particularly, when it comes to creating marketing campaigns. An ad agency often employs the most creative talents in the marketing industry. So that they can provide you with resources that meet the company’s standards.

Limited Perspectives

Ever heard the saying “four eyes see more than two?” While this saying originally referred to wearing glasses, this concept also holds true for agencies. Why? Because getting input and suggestions from a team often brings new ideas from a completely fresh point of view. But, if an in-house marketing team makes use of the same old tricks, it’ll fail.

The team may have grown so accustomed to the habits and philosophy of the company that they don’t even consider thinking outside the box, which can sometimes be a drag. Ultimately, involving an agency that shares the same values and ethos, but is able to be objective and offer a different perspective, can bolster campaigns and generate results.

The Best In House Marketing Toolkits

Choosing whether to work with an advertising agency or use your own in-house marketing team is always a tricky debate. While an agency offers experience and resources, choose the wrong company and you’ll go through an excruciating process just to get out of the contract. On the other hand, an in-house team allows for more control.

But, it also means going through the extensive (and laborious) recruitment process. Realistically, most in-house teams are steadily becoming more common in business. And I think this is partly due to the improvement in available tools these days. Previously, you would have to work with an agency to access all the usefulness of these tools.

Learn More: What Is Guerrilla Marketing? 11 Examples to Inspire Your Brand

Obviously, because they were the ones with the budget for them. Luckily, as of now, various tools of all voluminous shapes, sizes, and purposes are available all over — both for small businesses and startup organizations alike. If you have an in-house marketing team, a tip for success is to outsource as much as possible.

Not to mention, with efficiency at the core of an in-house marketing team, you can’t have members of the team wasting resources. Or rather, whilst spending every day simply keeping up with the menial tasks. With this in mind, I’ve listed some of the very best tools and resources used by in-house marketing teams in this day and age below.

Consider:

There you have it! Some of the most effective tools for you or your in-house marketing teams. Whether you want to automatically optimize social media ad campaigns or design graphics for your website, you have some great options. Especially, after the iOS 14 release, you can overcome your data-related discrepancies with Trapica and Kenshoo.

Additionally, before I forget, it’s also good that you consider AI tools that run serf analysis. Bearing in mind, when you’re creating content for SEO, you’ll have to find a lot of different topics on Google. Or even do tons of searches to figure out not just what topics to write about, but what are your competitors doing. So that you can write way better content.

In Detail: 30+ Jaw-Dropping Guerrilla Marketing Examples

For this reason, there are some of the best platforms to check out. Such as Frase.io, Marketmuse, Clearscope, a Seoscout, Grammarly. Grammarly is great, especially if you’re like me and you have terrible grammar and spelling. And you know, when you think about Grammarly, it’s not really as is a marketing tool but you’ll need good grammar.

Last but not least, another useful tool that’s worth mentioning is Ubersuggest Chrome Extension as well. Look, Ubersuggest is a very great tool that you can use for free. Particularly, whenever you’re on Google and you’re doing your searches. As well as when you’re looking up your competitors or you’re even visiting their website business.

Takeaway Notes:

An in-house advertising agency is structured like a traditional agency but only has one client: its mother company. It isn’t necessarily the only agency the mother company is working with but it often focuses on specific advertising areas.

Employing an in-house marketing team has individual strengths and weaknesses. Most of the traits of in-house marketing can either be seen as positive or negative. But in the end, it’s always based on your company’s needs.