ARTICLES
“One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is outsourcing to save money without taking into account the long-term marketing vision. This is primarily true with your foundational element: your website.”
Is your marketing agency outsourcing your website development and hosting to save costs? How do you know? They may be saving money by using a third-party vendor to host and manage your website. This outsourcing comes with risks. The most obvious being that your website is more than just a line item in a cost analysis spreadsheet. It’s home base for your entire marketing strategy.
Here’s my line of thought on this. I recently attended an outstanding event in Nashville (TN) called the AI Summer Summit, where attendees had the chance to learn how to harness AI-integrated strategies and tools to drive business results. There were speakers focusing on legal, IT security, HR, marketing strategy, and accounting.
I was particularly intrigued by the accounting presenter. She described profit and loss strategy in general, and at the end, she said, “If the employee is not profitable based on your metrics, outsource it.”
WHOA! Now, I realize that she was speaking in generalities. However, as someone who runs a digital marketing agency that serves more than 100 clients across multiple industries, one of the biggest mistakes I see people make is outsourcing to save money without taking into account the long-term marketing vision. This is primarily true with your foundational element: your website.
A website is not a project; it’s the infrastructure for your marketing. It’s your showroom, and it’s usually the first impression a potential customer has of your company. But it’s also the foundation for almost all of your marketing efforts.
This is why website development is usually the most expensive department in a digital marketing firm and, consequently, where some agencies like to cut costs. Trusting this essential piece of your company’s marketing to an unknown third party is treacherous, at best.
As I noted earlier, your website is your chance to make a good first impression with a potential customer. If your ideal consumers are searching online for products, services, and expertise to meet a specific need, your website is where you want them to find the answers.
Your digital marketing agency should prioritize your website to do just that, rather than treating it as just one “tool” that can easily be outsourced to a third party. Here are seven specific reasons why your agency should be managing your website in-house.
If you work with an agency that promises a quick turnaround to “finish” your website and then takes a long time to make any site updates, that’s a red flag. They’re probably outsourcing your site to a third-party developer to save money.
A website is never really finished. A long-term marketing strategy requires new website landing pages, service pages, content hubs, conversion improvements, tracking changes, integrations, and updates for SEO and AI visibility. If every one of these changes has to go through an outside developer, simple marketing ideas can become slow and expensive.
Agencies with skilled in-house website developers can make these changes quickly. In-house agency developers are typically more accessible than freelance or outsourced developers.
If your website remains static for three or four years, you’re losing an enormous opportunity to increase qualified leads and conversions.
Calls-to-action, forms, landing pages, navigation, messaging, and page layouts should change as you learn more about visitor behavior on your website. (This is what we’re talking about when we refer to website optimization here at Power Marketing.)
A developer disconnected from the marketing team may not understand that updates like these are more than one-off website updates. They should be part of your ongoing conversion strategy.
An internal website developer is key to the success of a marketing program. Daily communication about clients’ traffic conversion, web traffic, and revenue goals keeps them engaged in improving the product.
Even if you use a common content management system like WordPress, there are variations in the way the code is written by each developer. Excessive plugins, custom code, proprietary frameworks, and poorly documented modifications can cost your company a fortune down the road.
When you work with an agency’s in-house developer, the developer will gain familiarity with your website’s code, the way it was written, and how functions like filters and sliders are set up. The better the code, the more efficient the website. The more efficient the website, the more potential customers will engage with it.
Once your developer is familiar with your website’s custom code and frameworks, he or she can then work on improving your site’s technical SEO score, including:
URL structure, internal linking, navigation, schema, page templates, crawlability, site speed, mobile performance, and Core Web Vitals can all affect organic performance. Fixing these things after a website has been built is usually more difficult than building them correctly from the beginning.
When addressing these SEO elements, the project manager or operations team can communicate directly with the website developer during the process to make sure each element is created and installed correctly, saving headaches down the road.
This isn’t necessarily a criticism. It’s what they’re being paid to do. But someone involved in your long-term strategy should challenge a website development request when appropriate: “Why are we doing this? Could we accomplish this another way?”
On almost every website project, our internal web development team at Power Marketing will challenge the “why” behind the build. Sometimes they are wrong, and sometimes they are right. But the result is always a collaborative effort that will make the website better.
An internal development team learns why decisions were made, how tracking is configured, which pages drive paid campaigns, which sections generate organic traffic, and where previous problems occurred. Constantly changing outsourced developers means constantly rebuilding that knowledge.
Look at it this way: How can a developer design a website to tell your company’s story if they don’t even know who you are?
This is my favorite reason why we don’t outsource web development for our clients. In the past, when I’ve used freelance or outsourced web developers, the biggest problem has been accountability.
Once you begin a large website build, there’s pretty much no going back after the first 30 days. If the developer is not meeting the timeline, you’re stuck. I can speak from experience, based on some previous builds taking 60-90 days. So believe me when I tell you that starting over again will cost you a fortune, and the client will not be happy with a 2-3 month delay.
Then there’s the finger-pointing. SEO says development is the problem. Development says the SEO recommendations weren’t clear. PPC says the landing page isn’t converting. The developer says they built what they were given. Meanwhile, you’re paying everyone.
An integrated marketing team has fewer places to hide. With daily communication and someone with the authority to make a decision to fix the problem, accountability issues stop.
Your website performs better when the people building it are working alongside the team responsible for your SEO, paid media, content, and overall marketing strategy. With an in-house development team, updates happen faster, communication is clearer, and your website can continuously evolve with your business.
See what can happen when development is disconnected from the marketing team in our Whiskey JYPSI case study, then learn more about Power Marketing’s in-house website development services on our Website Development page.
Ready to work with one accountable, digital marketing team for your website and digital marketing? Call me at 615-257-0057 or reach out on our website if you’d like to learn more.
Want to learn more about this Power Marketing blog topic? Here are some helpful online resources to get you started.