Bringing Marketing In-House: The Process and Client Examples

Marketing work grows exponentially as a business expands, both because the number of activities grows and because each activity gains more variants.

Take a marketing company working for a cram school that wants to attract students.

At first it hands out flyers within a 5 km radius of the main school to win regular enrolments.
Having won a certain number of prospects, it adds web advertising.

The cram school succeeds, so branches open. Every new branch means running the same promotion again, and the technical updates for each activity have to be kept up with as well.

As the work mounts up like this, many companies hand it to a marketing company.
Outsourcing means head-office staff can concentrate on their main business:running the school (teaching students).
Lean too heavily on outsourcing, though, and you get rising costs and no ability to respond to marketing needs quickly.

My own view is this: leave the first push to the professionals, then bring in-house whatever you can once things are on track That is a good policy.
In the early days of a business, highly specialised marketing work is left to professionals (an outside firm) until it is running smoothly. Outsourcing all of it for ever, though, leaves management thinking flat, and speed degrades in the middle period.

The flow for bringing work in-house runs as follows.
① Explain the structure and set out the workflow
② List the points to watch
③ Put measurement in place
④ Onboarding

This article explains the flow for bringing work in-house, using a real example.

※ Before we start: if you want to go back over the bigger picture — what in-house marketing is, its advantages and disadvantages — this article is worth reading alongside.
Related article:
What is in-house marketing? Its advantages, disadvantages and the keys to success

1. Explain the structure and set out the workflow

The example here is bringing affiliate work in-house. Affiliate marketing means winning sign-ups mainly through placements on ranking sites.
The slides below show how it works and what the workflow is.

After explaining the overall structure as above, each part of the workflow is set out.

2. List the points to watch

Affiliate advertising involves [negotiation] with partners every day.
[The client, who wants cheap traffic] VS [the affiliate, who wants to sell that traffic high] — those are the two intentions at work.
For affiliate management, where negotiation matters, we put the stances that count and the order to negotiate in down in writing.
You have to negotiate carefully towards a line where the affiliate neither brands you unreasonable and refuses to place you, nor overcharges you.

Part of the actual document is attached.

It is a little hard to read as text, but the know-how is written up in Word so that it reaches people intact.

For more on the techniques, see the article below by Tabiraki, our executive officer.

Affiliate advertising for recruitment: what it does, how to run it, and which networks to use [2026]

4. Put measurement in place

Next we deliver the management sheet for measurement.
It is a sheet for tracking which websites sent how many people this month, on what terms (this industry has several of its own, such as guaranteed approval rates) and at what price.

Below is an image of the measurement document.

4. Onboarding

After going through all of steps 1 to 3, we provide onboarding support for three months on average.
In practice that means answering small questions over chat and a fortnightly regular meeting.
In the affiliate example, negotiating with affiliates is the hardest part, so we sit in on those.

We also hold a meeting where the month’s results are pulled together and next month’s direction is decided.
At that point it matters to bring in both teaching and coaching, and to walk alongside the client until they can make decisions as a marketer.

Related article:
What is in-house marketing? Advantages, disadvantages and what makes it work

5. In summary

We hope the flow for bringing work in-house is clearer now.

Explain the structure, write down the steps, list the points to watch, build in measurement, and run an onboarding that gets people used to making decisions.

We did this at a company where I serve as CMO, and lifted the division’s annual revenue by more than 200%.

Affiliate advertising is the example used here, but SEO article writing, Google Ads, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter all work the same way.

And by handing over one piece of work after another, the links between activities start to show, and you mature as a marketer.
Rather than leaving it all to an outside firm, do try at least one.

We give away the full detail of this in-housing flow for free, so if you have thought “I want to bring that part of our digital marketing in-house”, do get in touch.