I had the chance to work at a Digital Marketing agency earlier in my career, it was a wonderful transition from a student to an intern with full-fledged student-like training program. As I climbed the ladder up and moved to another company a couple years later as an in-house digital marketing officer, I noticed how different the work was here. There are pros and cons in both the scenarios and each person is suited to their specific needs, let's dig a little deeper.
How Things Work at an Agency
An agency is typically a B2B company which provides their marketing services to several clients which are businesses themselves. Usually in an agency there are assigned teams for individual tasks and sectors of marketing, and each employee handles a bunch of clients' for that part. There are certain things which I experienced and noticed during my working period at the agency.
- Lots of people to learn from - Working in an agency is rather fun, the main reason behind it is that everyone you are working alongside with are in the same boat. Meaning, the levels of hierarchy may be a lot but you also learn from them. In case of an issue, the clients may differ but someone at some point definitely has experienced what you are doing now.
- Several clients at once - As mentioned earlier, working in an agency means you get to handle several clients at once, this may not be a bad or good thing necessarily. You get the exposure to look into and study the business of different industry types but also you only handle specific parts of these and not entirely.
- Handle one part of the account - Even though you get the exposure to work with different clients, you only work with them on certain parts. As a result you don't entirely get a chance to explore other digital marketing arenas of the same client.
- Deadline oriented - Agencies are often deadline oriented and work loaded. Since clients have expectations and goals to be achieved in certain period of time, it is always unrealistically expected to achieve them within the time period.
- Experienced in the field strategy wise - Agencies most often are experienced in their forte, since they get to work with so many different prospects. As a result, agencies have a set of strategies and rules which are re-used and applied for suitable accounts.
- Tools and products to run smoothly - Investing in quality tools is often an asset for the agencies unlike an in-house marketing team, where investing in a tool for one prospect and few people sounds like a waste.
- Clients have impossible demands at times - Another disadvantage which comes with having to deal with several clients is that sometimes because of lack of experience, the clients don't realize that their demands are unrealistic.
How Things Work In-House:
An in-house marketing team is a team of marketeers who work for one brand, which is their own company ie. their employer. Many a times companies have their own marketing department instead of outsourcing their marketing tasks to an agency, mostly because marketing requires in-depth knowledge of the company or most of their leads depend on marketing done by their team.
- Lots of creative space & independence - When you work in-house with a company's marketing team, it is generally a smaller team compared to an agency and hence you will have a lot of creative space, to plan out strategies and test them out on your own.
- One focus - Unlike an agency where you have to work with several accounts at once, working in-house means you will have one focus: which is the company you work for.
- Get to know the procedure in and out - Most of the times, due to small team size, employees are expected to contribute in all arenas of the marketing spectrum. Hence you will thoroughly understand how the entire process works in and out.
- Small team but interaction with sales & other departments - Even though the teams are small and you are pretty much expected to figure things out yourself, you will have the amazing opportunity to work and interact with other departments. As the work is connected in a way where there is a need to exchange information with other departments.
- Clueless at times - Mostly because of lack of like-minded people around working on the same things as you, there might be a little bit of confusion at times about the work. You have to come up with plans and ideas to run things smoothly yourself.
- No exposure to other types of clients - This is kind of the obvious one, when you work in-house you only work with your company and hence there is no exposure to different industries and types of clients.
- Slow-paced work - Because of lack of supervision and strict deadlines, working in-house is mostly slow paced.
In conclusion both the options have their own sets of pros and cons, it's necessary for you to work in both kinds of industries to understand what works for you the best. Working in an agency will make you a jack of all trades and master of none, where as working in-house gives you less exposure to standard practices and people from your industry. In-house marketing will make you an independent worker, whereas working in an agency will give you a chance to learn from and work with other professionals. Working in an agency can be tiring with the workload, but working in an agency can sometimes leave you clueless about the next steps of the plan.
It is mostly recommended to work with an agency in the initial days of your digital marketing career as working in-house demands more experience and work independence from you.
Good luck!