What Is In-House Marketing? Benefits, Drawbacks and Keys to Success

Many companies outsource marketing work to advertising agencies and the like.
Using specialists keeps the load off internal resources, but “It is hard to see the whole picture of our marketing activity”, “No knowledge builds up in-house”, “We cannot control external resources well” are problems that quite a few companies have.

To bring marketing in-house successfully, understand the advantages and disadvantages first, then do it at a pace that fits your own situation.

In this article, “We want to bring marketing in-house, but we do not know where to start”— this is for marketers who think that. We begin with what in-house marketing actually is, then the advantages and disadvantages of adopting it and the points that make it work, explained in plain terms.

1. What is in-house marketing?

In-house marketing (in-house meaning done internally) means taking all or part of the work involved in marketing and carrying it out inside your own organisation rather than contracting it to an agency or a production company.
A company’s marketing covers a wide range: planning strategy, producing advertising, running it and improving it (PDCA).

2. Advantages of in-house marketing

Bringing marketing in-house has the following advantages.

・Know-how builds up in-house
・You can run the PDCA cycle on activity quickly
・It reduces costs

We take each in turn.

2.1 Know-how and data build up in-house

Bringing the whole run of marketing work in-house lets you build up know-how in marketing and advertising management, along with data of your own.
With outsourcing you usually get results reported in a monthly report, but that alone can make it hard to judge what worked and what did not, and it is not unusual to end up repeating activity that misses the point.
And if you end one agency contract and sign with another, you start from zero, so the effort so far can come to nothing.

Accumulated marketing know-how is valuable not only for winning new leads, but also for strengthening relationships with existing customers and for developing new products and services.
As staff come to understand your products and services more deeply, new ways of approaching both active buyers and people not yet in the market may become visible.
The marketing know-how and data you gain by in-housing is an asset for growing the business.

2.2 You can optimise marketing as a whole

In most cases each supplier turns the marketing strategy into concrete activity, and where you use a different supplier for each project the activity tends to be optimised in isolation.
Your own people understand your marketing strategy deeply, so they can optimise across all of the activity. And with an internal team running the PDCA cycle directly, you can expect activity to be refined faster.

2.2 It reduces costs

Cutting outsourcing costs is one of the reasons many companies aim to bring work in-house. For example, if you have an agency run your web advertising, you pay a fee of around 20% of the platform spend (the advertising budget), whatever the results.
Budget 1,000,000 yen a month and only 800,000 yen is actually spent on ads.
The larger the budget, the larger the fee you pay. Bring advertising management in-house and you save that fee.

And because Beyond the money, cutting the cost of communicating with the agency is a big advantage too. Advertising production, consulting, running the website, SEO: a great many companies and a great many people are involved in marketing work.

The more people involved, the higher the communication cost, and the easier it is for mistakes to arise from poor understanding. Simply waiting for a reply by email or chat can also lose you half a day. In-house, most of that communication stays between your own people, so you can expect productivity to rise.

3. Which work can you bring in-house?

The work you might bring in-house includes the following.

3.1 Planning marketing strategy

Marketing strategy means deciding who you deliver what value to through your business (STP*), then planning what value you offer target customers, at what price and through which channel.

That ranges in scale from what value the company offers society down to what pain a single product or service removes for a target customer, or what benefit it gives them.

Planning marketing strategy — gathering large volumes of market data, mapping the customer journey, working with the marketing funnel — calls for people with specialist knowledge and analytical skill, that is, marketers.

※ Short for segmentation, targeting and positioning

3.2 Producing and running advertising

Once the marketing strategy is set, you work out what message to deliver to your target and turn it into every kind of advertising. Advertising falls into four main categories.

[Types of advertising]
・Mass media advertising (TV commercials, newspapers, inserts, transport advertising and so on)
・Web advertising (network advertising, search advertising and so on)
・Sales promotion (SP)
・Human advertising (through influencers, bloggers and the like)

Advertising used to mean mass media first of all, but as digital devices have spread in recent years the main battleground has moved to web advertising. Web advertising has many advantages — anyone can publish, you can start with a small spend, you can narrow your target clearly, and you can expect a return over a short period — but it also changes very fast, so you cannot do without people whose job is running web advertising.

3.3 Running owned media

Alongside paying for placement to push yourself in front of your target, another approach has become mainstream in recent years: putting the information your target needs where they already go online, so that they find it through search.

Owned media is one of those. Owned means held by your own company, and in general use it usually refers to media on the web, that is, sites; strictly, though, it also covers offline things such as your own brochures.

[Owned media: online]
・Company website
・Corporate site
・Campaign site
・Online shop
・Your own media
・Email newsletter
・Apps
and so on

[Owned media: offline]
・Company brochure
・Product catalogue
・Monthly magazines, member magazines, house journals
・Seminars
・Shops
and so on

4. Barriers to in-housing, and how to deal with them

In-house marketing has plenty of advantages, from building know-how to cutting costs, but you need to be aware that it carries these risks as well.

・You need people with deep expertise
・Know-how may end up tied to one person
・Information that came via the agency stops coming

We look at each in detail.

4.1 You need people with deep expertise

To do in-house marketing you need to assemble people with deep expertise. Work that specialists at agencies and production companies handled in their own fields now has to be handled by your own staff.

If nobody in-house is right for it, you have to spend time and money hiring, or train someone from scratch. Strong people have a high market value, so expect hiring to cost a great deal in salary.

Push in-housing through without securing enough resource and you can easily end up with most of the time going on operational work such as running ads and writing reports, while the fundamental changes make almost no progress.

4.2 Work becoming dependent on one person

Even once you have gathered marketing people and in-housing is running smoothly, you need to make sure the know-how you gain does not become tied to individuals.
Web marketing and the production and running of advertising are especially specialist and not easy to put into words, so the same person tends to stay on the work and it becomes theirs alone.

Once that happens, only that person can do the work, and if they leave, the work itself becomes a black box and the team is left in disarray.
To prevent it, put a small team rather than one person on the work.
And because Writing the work up as a manual is another way. Aim for a healthy organisation where know-how passes on even when the person in the role changes.

4.3 Information that came via the agency stops coming

Agencies and production companies are advertising specialists, so they keep building know-how and keep their information up to date. If in-housing means cutting the agency relationship off entirely, you can no longer pick up what those companies know.

Operating companies, though, tend to collect information about their own industry and can be badly short of the latest market news. If that happens, the person in the role has to go and get it at seminars and in various communities, which costs both time and money.

So as you push in-housing forward, especially early on, the load is often heavier than expected. The environment changes a lot as well, so take care not to put too much stress on the people involved.
Bringing in a consultancy that supports in-house marketing, or contracting part of the work out, are sensible approaches.

5. Making in-house marketing work

Here are the points worth remembering if you want in-house marketing to work.

5.1 Bring work in-house a little at a time

Bring marketing activity that many agencies used to handle in-house all at once and, with know-how short and no people to spare, the work may slow down or stop altogether.

The single most important point when in-housing work you used to outsource is not to take it all internal at once, but to move a little at a time, starting where you can.
If you do not know where to start, we suggest talking once to a consultancy that specialises in in-house marketing.

A plan you can actually keep to is what makes in-housing work.
Securing someone you can always ask at the outset helps with the planning, of course, and is also a strength when something goes wrong after in-housing starts, because you can correct course straight away.

5.2 Draw a line between work to bring in-house and work to keep outside

Taking every piece of work in-house is not necessarily right.
Some work gives better value for money, or leaves staff more satisfied, when it is outsourced.
So when you in-house, it matters that you draw a line between the work that should be internal and the work that should not.

Ideally your own people concentrate on core work such as setting marketing strategy and building the team. Try to in-house non-core work such as preparing documents as well, while the team is still short of resource, and staff satisfaction can fall as everyone is buried in day-to-day tasks.
As you in-house, the point is to identify clearly the core work that should be internal and to be willing to get outside help for the rest.

※ Another article explains in detail the four concrete steps for in-housing a little at a time, and real customer examples. Do read it alongside this one.
Related article:
The flow for bringing marketing in-house, and customer examples

6. In-house marketing case studies

Here are case studies of companies NowVillage has supported on the subject of bringing marketing in-house.

6.1 Training their own people took monthly enquiries from 51 ⇒ 472.

Shota Kozono, President and Representative Director, Acial Design Inc.
We were in a growth phase but had nobody with marketing experience in the company, so we could not set an effective strategy and had no know-how for the work. Digital marketing matters for business growth, and rather than keep outsourcing to one company after another we wanted to bring it in-house, build up our own know-how and be free to customise, so we asked NowVillage to support us in doing that.
The result: they walked a marketer with no experience through planning, delivering, reporting and improving a strategy, and in a year monthly enquiries rose around ninefold.
They now support the whole of our marketing — advertising, owned media, social, PR, hiring — and what we value is that they have the know-how to plan, deliver and improve in each of those areas, and that they work alongside us at our own level, dealing with everyone involved flexibly, in the right words and at the right distance.

6.2 Support from scratch for bringing the proposal, delivery and improvement of advertising management in-house.

Yudai Shimizu, President and Representative Director, KSB Inc.
One of our businesses is building websites and web systems. Customers sometimes asked us to help bring in traffic once the site or system was finished, so we decided to set up an advertising management arm in-house. We had no know-how, though, so we asked NowVillage to train the people who would run it.
In our case we also needed know-how for pitching to customers, and they taught us from simulating advertising results and designing the plan onwards, with manuals and sheets we could actually use, so that in a sense we could keep going on our own once NowVillage was no longer there.
While they were supporting us they also answered questions about digital marketing beyond advertising, and we were very satisfied that our staff gained new knowledge and improved their skills.

6.3 From ad hoc marketing activity to a team that tests hypotheses against a plan.

Enrise Holdings Inc.
We started by reviewing the business plan, and marketing goals genuinely tied to that plan became clear. On delivery, we learned not only how to run Google Ads and social advertising and how to run the PDCA cycle to get results, but also the character of each platform, how its market feels and what other companies are doing, so we can now think at the level of concrete activity that closes the gap between target and actual.
We were also able to learn what kind of information a marketer should keep an eye on and take in day to day.

7. Work with an external partner that believes in sharing know-how

We hope that was useful.
So in-house marketing has many advantages — know-how builds up, the PDCA cycle runs smoothly so activity moves quickly, costs come down — while the shortage of specialist people and work becoming tied to individuals are the problems.

Early in an in-housing project, far more work lands on the people responsible than they imagine. To get in-housing onto a successful path smoothly, find a dependable partner you can ask at any time.

Related article:
The flow for bringing marketing in-house, and customer examples

NowVillage supports companies in bringing their marketing in-house and making it work.
For an overview of the service,click here。
To get in touch,click here。