It’s been almost two decades since influencer marketing took off. Every company, large and small, is flocking to find reputable influencers who can successfully market their products and services, attract leads, and boost conversions.

While there’s no denying that influencer marketing can benefit a business, it can also take a toll on your finances without providing any guarantees for the return on your investments.

Therefore, if you want to take control of your marketing budget, enhance your reach, and attract more customers, there’s only one thing you can do – develop in-house marketing strategies.

Depending on how you approach this task, your in-house marketing can be significantly more effective than any influencer you could partner with.

Take a look below if you want to learn about the top three in-house marketing strategies that will guarantee your success.

What exactly is in-house marketing?

As the name would suggest, in-house marketing involves having a dedicated marketing department within your organization. It means having experienced teams on your payroll who research trends, identify the best tools and software for your needs, develop marketing strategies, coordinate with your sales teams, and more.

Of course, even with an in-house team, you can still coordinate efforts with third-party marketing services and agencies. Over 38% of B2B companies rely on both in-house and outsourced teams. However, outsourced teams are only hired for specific tasks. It’s up to your in-house department to develop specific marketing strategies and solutions.

Why you should consider in-house marketing

Although having a dedicated marketing team could seem like an inordinate expense, it can be highly beneficial to your business. With in-house marketing, you’ll enjoy:

• Improved control – you’ll enjoy complete transparency and have full control over how you will implement your marketing strategies;
• Consistent branding – your in-house team understands your company culture and values, and dictates every minute aspect of your strategies, perfecting the brand voice and persona, and delivering consistent branding;
• Better ROI – your in-house teams have access to all the relevant data that can help improve their strategies and increase the return on your investments;
• More flexibility – if you need custom-made marketing solutions, your in-house teams can create them without issues, offering you more flexibility and versatility;
• Lower costs – outsourcing your marketing needs to influencers is often costly, making in-house teams more affordable.

A talented in-house marketing team is an indispensable asset that can only help you push your company forward. In contrast, influencer marketing comes with a few significant challenges you’ll need to keep in mind.

The challenges of influencer marketing

At first glance, influencer marketing seems like the perfect solution. You’ll gain access to the entirety of your chosen influencer’s audience, reach new markets, and boost your reputation – or will you? Influencer marketing isn’t all it appears to be, coming with many challenges and obstacles you might not have thought of.

The primary challenge is finding an influencer who meets your needs.

While there are many great ways you can collaborate with an influencer, if you make the wrong choice of partner, it could do more harm than good. After all, once you start your collaboration, your reputations are intertwined. Working with an influencer with a poor reputation will reflect poorly on your brand. Partnering with someone who doesn’t make sense for your niche will only lead to wasting your money.

Additional challenges include finding an influencer with a large-enough following, ensuring that those followers are real, agreeing on the price of their services, and having them stay true to your brand’s messaging.

Although you could potentially reap excellent rewards with influencer marketing, you’re also taking on a significant risk.

The top in-house marketing strategies

Considering the potential risks that influencer marketing holds, and the numerous advantages of in-house marketing, it’s obvious which of the two could be a better choice for your business. Take a look at some of the top in-house marketing strategies you could adopt.

Focusing on SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical for any business that wants to get more from its marketing. It enables you to create a solid online presence and establish yourself as an authority within your niche.

With a robust SEO campaign, you will:

• Increase organic discovery – good SEO practices can improve your ranking on search engines and make you more visible to your audiences;
• Boost your credibility – users trust engines like Google (News - Alert), so a great ranking on search engines automatically boosts your credibility and improves your trustworthiness;
• Improve user experience – SEO is all about improving the user experience and making site visitors satisfied;
• Improve your PPC campaigns – SEO and PPC campaigns work in tandem to spark the interest of your audiences and help you improve conversions.

Having your in-house teams work together with an SEO agency to develop a comprehensive campaign gives you a chance to engage with your target audiences and build meaningful relationships with them without relying on the outside help of influencers.

Remarketing strategies

Remarketing is the simple process of creating marketing campaigns that target audiences who have already interacted with your brand. It can be a highly beneficial strategy that helps you retain customers and improve your reputation.

Since your target audience has already made previous contact with your brand, you’ll have plenty of information on them to make them convert. You’ll know which of your pages they’ve visited, whether they’ve interacted with your customer support, how long they stayed on your website, and whether they added anything to their cart before leaving.

You can then use this information to create more personalized remarketing campaigns with significantly improved conversion rates.

Online reputation management

Your reputation is everything. Regardless of the quality of your products or the excellence of your sales teams, if you don’t take charge of your online reputation, you won’t be able to attract new customers or retain old ones. After all, there’s a reason why over 79% of marketers are exceptionally cautious about using the right messaging and keeping their marketing content relevant.

Unfortunately, it’s not only your actions that impact your reputation. A fake review could sway potential customers to turn to your competitors. An emotional rant about your brand on a niche forum could make the wrong impression on your target market.

Therefore, you’ll need to focus on online reputation management to improve your marketing and boost conversions.

Your in-house marketing teams can easily track all brand mentions and take action to ensure a spotless reputation that improves your marketing strategies.

Final thoughts

Although it presents challenges, in-house marketing offers too many benefits to be neglected. With a talented marketing team and the right outsourced agency, you can cut costs, increase the return on your investments, improve lead generation, and ultimately outperform your competitors.

Authors’ Bio

Darko Dodig - Darko is the founder of Wisevu agency and has been specializing in technical SEO since 2008. His expertise includes teaching advanced SEO tactics and creating SEO processes and SOPs that result in consistent SEO success.