Agency or in-house, what's the difference?.

​In-house

An in-house position means you’ll be dedicated to working for your company and its own brands. You might work across a variety of disciplines depending on what you do for them.

In a Marketers’ perspective, working for a supermarket could mean you’re responsible for in-store signage, customer membership programmes, internal communications with staff, e-commerce website updates, and more.

With an in-house role you’ll know your own company inside out. Your stakeholders may be in different departments within your organisation such as, buying teams, insights teams, digital teams, and perhaps branch managers.

While you can still have clients, you’ll be paying them for their expertise and making the final decisions.

In-house positions have their own advantages. Working with similar types of people, and the same brand gives you time to de-construct how different departments work together. You’ll be able to see how a brand has grown over time, and more importantly, you’ll have more of a say. In-house positions need you to stretch the knowledge you have in your field to helping them grow just as you do.

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Agency

Agency roles still require you to manage a lot of things at once. However, the main difference is that you’ll be working for your clients. These people will have outsourced you to promote or market their brand.

The time you take costs them money, so what you do needs to serve the objectives that you have agreed together.

The agency model can work in two ways. You can either be a specialist in your field, for example, an SEO Consultant, in which you would provide SEO for multiple clients. Or you could take on the role of an Account Manager.

This role means you’re the point of call for your client, overseeing everything your agency is providing them. As an Account Manager, you know your client as if you work for them, and you help liaise with people inside your agency on behalf of them.

In an agency setting, you would get a lot of exposure to different brands in a short time period. You’ll also be the go-to person for the knowledge you provide to many companies. There are a host of benefits that come with agency roles such as being adaptable to how different businesses do things as each client will have their own ways of working.

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Working in an agency and working in-house gives you a very different day-to-day, but this breaks them down so you can decide which positions may suit you better.

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