Are you a retailer looking to grow your business?
If yes, one of the most important decisions you’ll face is how to structure your marketing team—should you bring someone in-house, partner with an agency, or find a middle ground?
This choice impacts your budget, but also your ability to scale or adapt to new channels. All this ultimately works towards driving revenue, if done right.
So, should you hire an agency? Or look for an in-house hire?
Let’s explore the key questions that will help you make the right decision for your business.
Hiring a Marketing Agency vs Hiring an In-House Marketer: Pros and Cons
Before we proceed, we’d like to clarify something. We are an ecommerce marketing agency. But no, we won’t be biased here—and instead we’ll look at both solutions objectively.
And both options have their distinct advantages.
If you want to hire a marketer in-house, you’ll get someone who can immerse in your brand only. This deep brand knowledge and full integration into your company culture will allow a good marketer to become an expert in your products and customers.
However, they’re still limited to one person’s skill set. They’ll require different benefits and overhead costs, while also having limited capacity and bandwidth for various complex marketing ops.
If you hire a marketing agency, it comes with immediate access to a full team of specialists across multiple channels—from paid ads to email marketing. They stay current with platform changes and best practices, while also coming with an established suite of tools and processes.
The trade-off? Less day-to-day control and potentially less intimate product knowledge. Though great agencies can bridge this gap quickly through dedicated account management.
Agency vs In-House Marketing: Key Questions to Ask
If you feel like you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, don’t despair.
There are some important questions to ask yourself when it comes to this choice and that will probably allow you to make a good choice.
📰 🛒 If you’re a Shopify retailer, we’ve already gone through the essentials of hiring a Shopify expert, so you can refer to that article as well.
- What Is My Budget, and What Are the Total Costs?
Beyond the obvious salary comparison, consider the full picture.
An in-house marketer requires salary, benefits, equipment, software subscriptions, and ongoing training. For a mid-level marketer, this easily exceeds $70,000-$90,000 annually for a generalist.
Agency retainers vary widely but provide predictable monthly costs with no benefits or overhead.
Critically, consider opportunity cost. if you hire the wrong person, you’ve lost 3-6 months in recruiting, onboarding, and severance.
With agencies, you can pivot much faster if results aren’t meeting expectations.
- Do I Need Specialist Expertise or Generalist Skills?
Modern marketing requires proficiency across paid search, social media advertising, email automation, analytics, creative development, and now even AI knowledge.
A single in-house person might be strong in 1-2 areas, but can’t match the depth of specialized teams.
If you need sophisticated paid advertising campaigns, complex email flows, and influencer partnerships running simultaneously, an agency provides dedicated experts for each channel.
However, if your needs are straightforward—managing a simple social presence and basic email newsletters—a capable generalist might suffice.
Consider how specialized your marketing needs truly are.
- Is There Enough Work to Keep Someone Busy Full-Time?
Be honest about workload.
Many retailers find their marketing needs are either feast or famine—intense during launch periods or holiday seasons, then quieter during other months.
An in-house employee costs the same whether they’re swamped or slow.
Agencies offer flexibility to increase efforts during peak periods and scale back during slower months.
If you can’t identify 40 hours of meaningful marketing work every single week, year-round, an agency’s flexible model might serve you better while avoiding the awkwardness of an underutilized employee.
How Quickly Do I Need Results and Team Scalability?
Hiring takes time.
Recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, and the learning curve mean you’re looking at 2-4 months before an in-house hire hits their stride.
Agencies can typically launch campaigns within weeks, bringing established playbooks and immediate execution capability.
Additionally, if your needs grow—you want to add influencer marketing to your paid ads, for instance—an agency simply assigns additional specialists.
Scaling an in-house team means months of additional hiring.
For retailers with time-sensitive goals or rapidly changing needs, agency speed and scalability provide significant competitive advantages.
If you just want to go slow and grow your team company culture, then going in-house might be better.
How Important Is Deep Brand Integration and Daily Access?
In-house marketers live and breathe your brand daily. They attend team meetings, interact with customers, understand inventory nuances, and can pivot on a dime.
This intimacy is valuable, especially for brands with complex products or rapidly changing offerings.
However, strong agencies mitigate this through dedicated account managers who invest time learning your business deeply.
They combine this knowledge with cross-client insights—understanding what’s working across the industry.
If daily face-time is non-negotiable for your culture, in-house might win. But if you value strategic expertise and fresh perspectives equally, agencies deliver both.
Do I Have Internal Leadership to Guide Marketing Strategy?
A junior or mid-level in-house marketer needs direction.
If you don’t have a marketing leader internally to set strategy, provide mentorship, and evaluate performance, you risk hiring someone who executes tactics without strategic thinking.
Agencies bring strategic leadership as part of the package—senior strategists who’ve guided multiple brands and can advise on channel mix, budget allocation, and growth opportunities.
If you’re a founder or executive without deep marketing expertise, an agency provides the strategic guidance and education an in-house junior marketer can’t offer alone.
At Top Growth Marketing agency, we cultivate a team of growth experts for every channels, as well as base of influencers for whitelisting and a team of designers. Reach out.
What Are My Long-Term Goals and Growth Stage?
Your business stage matters enormously.
Early-stage retailers testing product-market fit benefit from agency flexibility—you can experiment across channels without long-term commitments.
High-growth retailers scaling quickly need teams that grow with them, which agencies accommodate seamlessly.
Mature retailers with established processes might build hybrid models.
Consider where you’ll be in 2-3 years. If you’re planning to build a large marketing department eventually, starting with an agency lets you learn what works before making permanent hires.
The agency becomes your training ground for understanding what in-house roles you’ll eventually need.
The Hybrid Model: An Alternative Solution for Many Retailers
For many small to medium-sized retailers, the answer isn’t either/or. It’s both.
A hybrid model combines the best of both worlds: An in-house marketing coordinator or manager can own brand voice, coordinate with other departments, and serve as the agency liaison.
At the same time, you can join forces with a specialized agency for technical execution of paid advertising, email marketing, and influencer campaigns.
This approach gives you the internal brand guardian and daily accessibility you need, while leveraging agency expertise for specialized channels that require constant optimization and technical know-how.
The in-house person ensures brand consistency and manages day-to-day content, while the agency drives performance marketing and brings enterprise-grade tools and strategies.
For growing retailers, this model often provides the optimal balance of control, expertise, and cost-effectiveness.
For most of our clients, we act as an extension of their marketing team. We have years of experience working with CMOs, VPs of marketing, as well as senior marketing managers. Let’s talk.
Conclusion
The choice between in-house and agency isn’t one-size-fits-all.
Consider your budget, expertise needs, workload consistency, growth trajectory, and internal capabilities.
Many successful retailers discover that partnering with a specialized agency, either exclusively or in a hybrid model, accelerates growth while providing flexibility that pure in-house teams can’t match.
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