For brands earning less than $1 million annually, outsourcing your paid marketing can be very risky. Here’s why:

“You simply cannot afford top tier paid marketing talent, agency or in-house”

At this stage, it’s crucial to keep marketing in-house. You, or someone incentivized in your business needs to understand the media buying thoroughly.

Your COGS is the highest, your margins are the thinnest and the media buying is still too valuable of a responsibility to be delegated.

Budget will be a concern when outsourcing paid marketing, and this means you’ll get a team that are just not experienced enough to handle your account. If they’re a freelancer or agency, they’ll have multiple small clients and may not give your account the attention it needs.

Let’s assume at budget rates, your freelancer or agency is playing a volume game, running 5+ accounts. It’s likely they’re spending less than an hour per day on your account. 

Is an hour a day on your brand’s key growth driver going to be what it takes to scale from $1M to $10M? Nope, we don’t think so either.

Our Recommendation: Keep running the Meta account yourself until you reach $1M in sales.

When brands reach the $1M revenue mark, a decision arises: Continue managing marketing in-house or bring in an agency?

At this point you may notice that the media buying, which was once the growth driver of the business, is now becoming a time draining bottleneck.

At this stage - there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Your choice depends on your own expertise.

Founders with a strong agency or brand marketing background can opt to build an in-house team, using their experience to vet potential candidates.

However, founders who are more experienced in other areas of the business, or simply aren’t marketers, should opt delegate to an agency. At this point, the founder(s) should be knowledgeable enough to vet an agency but can focus on their strengths while an agency can handle the responsibility of managing and reporting back paid media performance.

Our Recommendation: If you’rean expert in media buying, and have built and trained performance marketing teams before - go in-house. If not, opt for an agency.

At this stage of business, it’s likely you’ve seen success with one approach or the other. Now you should multiply your efforts to scale further by using both.

If you scaled with an agency, building a small in-house team can be valuable to test new strategies on the fly and launch creatives quickly that are already on brand without approval. Having an in-house team, integrated with the rest of your product, marketing and CX team can help ensure all your marketing messaging is accurate and relevant.

And if you scaled with an in-house team, using agencies can help unlock the next stage of growth. At this stage you’ll already know what products, creatives, and media buying strategies work on your account - it’s just a matter of scaling. By feeding your agency your insights, they can proliferate on your existing account. More creatives, more funnel testing, more media buying tests - all without needing to spend time managing a team in-house and adding layers of management.

Also agencies can use learnings from their other accounts to shortcut your growth for you. They’ll simply take proven strategies, creative concepts, funnels and use them on your account. Make sure you work with an agency not with a fancy office or case studies, but a smaller boutique one with relevant industry experience, who will ensure they execute proven strategies on your account whilst still having the bandwidth to treat your account as if it was your own.

Conclusion: Use both to scale.