Breaking Away from Agency Dependence: Bringing Web Advertising In-House

You have handed your web marketing advertising to an agency, but the results are not coming.
It is about time you brought web marketing in-house.

Does any of that sound familiar?

This article covers how to break a dependence on your agency and bring web marketing in-house.

What follows adds detail to the slides above.

1. A survey of how web marketing is actually run

Views differ from company to company on how to build a team that gets results in web marketing. Here we draw on survey data from WACUL Inc. to look at how web marketing is actually run today.
(Source: In-house or agency? What sort of team gets results from web advertising | A survey of web advertising practice II ttps://wacul.co.jp/lab/web-ad-operation-report-2/)

The survey found more companies running ads in-house than using an agency.

The most common reason for running in-house is wanting to build up the know-how inside the company.

On the other side, the top reasons for using an agency are a shortage of people and a shortage of know-how in-house.

In a survey of what companies using an agency are unhappy about, only around 10% said they had no particular complaints.
In other words, more than 90% have some complaint about their agency.

Using an agency to keep up with the latest developments or for business consulting is fine, but a state of dependence, where a shortage of resources and know-how leaves you using one despite serious misgivings, is something to get out of.

2. Why results fail to come even with an agency

Among complaints about agencies, “no results” ranks high.
Why do results fail to come even when the work goes to professionals?

Marketing is, at root, the machinery that connects the customer with the product.

And since prospects gather their information online, on a phone or a computer, digital marketing is a given.

To build that machinery between customer and product and make digital marketing work, you need
①an understanding of the customer ②an understanding of the product ③digital marketing skills
– all three of these are essential.

Digital marketing is only a means of communicating with the customer.

Understanding the customer
・what problems does the customer feel they have?
・how do they gather information to solve those problems?
・what kind of information holds their interest?

Understanding the product
・by what mechanism does the product solve the problem?
・what makes it better than the alternatives?
・how strong is the track record?

Only with that understanding at the foundation do digital marketing skills – which channel to use, and how to make the case for the product – come into play.

In other words, no depth of digital marketing expertise alone will deliver results.
When an agency that knows digital marketing inside out still fails to deliver, the reason usually lies in understanding the customer and understanding the product.

That said, building a web team from a standing start, with neither people nor know-how in-house, is very hard, so using an agency in the early phase has its place.
What matters is using one on the understanding that you will bring the work in-house.
Here is when to move on from that early build phase towards in-housing.

If your ad spend is under a million yen, you need to start working towards in-housing as soon as you can. Agencies treat accounts spending under a million yen a month as small, which makes it unlikely you will get a strong account manager.
They also put relatively little time into the account, so understanding of the customer and the product tends to be neglected.

Below a million yen, the fee also takes an unavoidably large share of the spend. If you want better results, look at in-housing as soon as you can.

If your business suits web advertising and a high share of revenue comes through it, it is important to bring the work in-house and build a team that can iterate faster, so as to push results further.

Finally, a word about agency accounts.
An agency can run your advertising either in its own account or in yours.
With an agency account, the client cannot see inside it, and the only information shared is the monthly report.
In that case nothing is handed over when the contract ends, and neither data nor know-how builds up inside the company. Carry on that way and the dependence only deepens, so act quickly.

3. How to go in-house in six months without hiring

There are two routes to in-housing: hiring a marketer, or training your own staff into the role. We recommend training your own staff.
There are three reasons.

①you cannot hire marketers
There are simply very few experienced marketers about, which makes the role very hard to fill.
And even someone with agency experience may only have taken over accounts a colleague was already running, with no experience of carrying an account from strategy through to execution, so take care.

②marketers do not stay
Marketers with agency backgrounds are often more interested in marketing technique than in the customer or the product, and in practice they rarely settle.

③training your own staff leads to results more readily
The best way to build the understanding of customer and product that successful marketing depends on is to experience the front line. Your own staff already have that understanding, which gives them high potential as marketers and makes results easier to come by.

The order in which to train a marketer
Train a marketer in-house in three phases.

Phase ①: understanding the whole picture of marketing
The first step is to learn the customer’s buying process, known as the marketing funnel, and the role each digital marketing tactic plays in it. On top of that, install a way of thinking about which activities take priority.

In concrete terms, as follows.

Phase ②: learning how to build machinery that harvests existing demand
One way to approach the people closest to buying, who already have an interest in the product and have started to act on it, is to build a landing page.
A landing page is a single web page, rather like a leaflet on the web, built to explain a product and lead the reader through to a purchase. You could call it a salesperson on the web. Placing a capable salesperson on the web cuts lost opportunities and maximises revenue.

There is a theory to what makes a landing page work.
You learn that theory and the skill of applying it to your own products.

Phase ③: choosing and setting up the channels that suit your target
Knowing the character of each channel lets you invest more effectively.
Think about a channel’s character along two axes: users and features.
The user axis is information about the groups of people gathered on a platform, for example that Instagram is used heavily by women in their twenties and thirties.
The feature axis, by contrast, is what the ad platform can do when it runs your ads.
Twitter, for example, can narrow delivery to people who follow a particular account. Using that, you can define a target in more detail and run work that is effective with little waste.
So by knowing both axes for each channel, who gathers there and what segments you can deliver to, you can choose where to invest far more effectively.

What remains is the specific settings needed to make full use of each feature.
This gets complicated, because the methods, the admin screens and the approach differ from channel to channel.

We have manuals covering the character, features and settings of each channel.
With them, even a beginner can choose and set up channels the way a professional would. If you are interested, get in touch here. (enquiry URL)

4. In closing

We hope that was useful.
We have covered why you need to break a dependence on agencies, and how to develop marketers from within. By its nature, digital marketing gives you a great deal of information you could never capture offline, such as what users actually did.

That data is an asset to a company. Do build a set-up that accumulates the information in-house and runs a plan-do-check-act cycle on it.
We support companies bringing marketing in-house.
In one client case we supported the work from the founding of the marketing team onwards,
and the company now consistently wins around 50 B2B leads a month and has achieved 164% year-on-year revenue growth.

If you are interested, do get in touch.

Thank you for reading to the end.