In-House or Outsorucing?

Companies are always faced with keeping overhead costs low. The first area that gets cut is the marketing and publicity budget.

So how does any company justify cutting these areas and maintain a constant campaign?

One solution that most pr clients and marketing clients think saves them money is to do all the work in-house. But does this really save money, or does it cost you (the client) more in the long haul? Let’s take a look.

To go in-house, you need to hire a marketing or pr director. Typically this person, if professional, and knows what he/she is doing, will have a salary of about $80,000 per year. An assistant would cost $40,000 a year as a starting salary. These figures can be more depending on their experience.

Now you have someone to do the entire writing, planning, meeting with reporters, publishers, coordinating marketing and pr activities and sometimes designing the sales and marketing materials.

Let’s just say this person, for now, needs to do a few releases. How are you going to distribute them? Do you do send them one at-a-time to the handful of media? Or do you go through a news bureau like Bacon’s. Well, Bacon’s costs about $3,000 per year membership and then you pay per release on top of that. In addition, the select few that are to your favorite media, need postage, envelopes, and what about the follow-up?

On top of the distribution costs, we need to again look at this person you hired. They need medical coverage, you need to pay the FICA costs and provide space for them and a phone line. The phone bill will now increase as well. An article that supports my viewpoint is called "Debunking the myth that B2B marketing is cheaper in-house", by John Elliott.

In addition, the person may not have the close contact relationships with the different media as your pr firm.

Ok, did you save any money? Most likely not. The costs when added together are probably more than a moderate publicity campaign for the year would have cost. And you can be sure that the outsource company will get the job done because they won’t be interuppeted with daily problems associated with an in-house publicity person.

No matter how many times we see this happen, it just seems that clients need to learn from their mistakes. Hopefully this brief lesson will give pr clients and public relations service companies the chance to see what really is best for them.

See Also

• How to control your publicity and marketing budgets
  Using outside firms can actually be profitable