Team up with an agency or hire someone? That’s the question many startup founders ask themselves the moment they need to expand their marketing efforts. Why not do both and take the best of both worlds? In most cases, starting with an agency and hiring your own staff a little bit further down the road, will help you make an impact much sooner. In this article, we explain why a hybrid marketing team is the future. 


Agency vs Employee

As an early stage startup, you have been focussing on developing your product. Once this process is ongoing you need to start building your business and marketing will become a necessity to reach your goals. Founders are commonly in the “hiring mode” when it comes to growing their team. They want their own people, in-house as part of their organization. While an agency can often be a better choice, especially in the early stages of your marketing organization. 

A qualified agency provides experienced marketers in various roles that are able to set up your marketing processes in a professional manner according to industry best practices. They will have your marketing setup in no time enabling you to make an impact sooner. An employee on the other hand, has to be trained and often has more peripheral tasks that are not related to marketing. So for the same budget, an agency is able to provide much more value in the early stages of your company.

Building a hybrid marketing team 

Once your first marketing efforts are paying off and your process has proven itself, we recommend you start adding your own staff to the marketing team. Keep the agency on board for a while, so they can make sure quality standards stay on par and your staff is onboarded correctly. When that is the case, the amount of agency members can scale down while some of them stay part of your marketing team for a longer time. This way you build a hybrid marketing team with the best of both worlds. 

While marketers in your staff can focus on executing your marketing strategy from now on, the agency staff can help you stay innovative and fresh by always having a fresh look at campaigns, social media, and other marketing activities. 

Agency selection 

Not every agency is set up to work in hybrid marketing teams. At Nexxt Industry this is what we do every day. We work closely with our clients and meet their needs in every stage of their existence. We act like normal employees to our clients, but much more flexible and scalable. 

Interested to learn more about our approach? Book a free Brand Booster session with our team and we will tell you everything about it!