There is risk and reward to pretty much every scenario in life. While there can certainly be benefits to managing your business’s advertising strategy in-house, there are also risks that can have significant, negative impact on your efforts.

Here are six risks you will want to weigh carefully when making the decision to manage your own advertising strategy or employ the expertise of an advertising agency. Take a look!

You may be sold something you don’t need

When implementing your own advertising strategy, you will be communicating directly with sales representatives from any number of outlets with whom you wish to advertise. Each of these contacts will have a different opinion, and sales strategy, that they will impose on you. Should you spend more money on digital advertising or print? That will likely depend upon what the sales rep you’re talking to is trying to sell more of that day. The risk here is that in dealing with each outlet individually, you may get sold an advertising package that includes placements that don’t really reach your target audience. The result is a waste of both time and money.

You could end up spending more money to achieve the same results

You may think a reward for implementing your own advertising strategy is that you are certain to save money. That’s not always guaranteed. Most advertising agencies never charge you directly for their services. Rather, they take your budget and negotiate deep discounts with each media outlet. They are then paid a percentage from the margin and pass on any additional savings to you. In other cases, ad agencies are paid a percentage directly from the media outlet. Trying to recreate the expertise, relationships and negotiation power that an agency brings, can be impossible or very costly to achieve in-house.

Other business matters may push advertising to the back burner

As a business owner, your number one focus is on operations and business development, as it should be. Many business owners who try to also manage their full advertising strategy in-house will often find themselves unable to make it a priority to the other day-to-day tasks of running the business. An inconsistent, or nonexistent advertising strategy isn’t going to be of much support to growing your business. For this reason, it’s a risk to assume you or your staff can manage everything in-house.

You could become complacent or stagnant with your strategy

Another risk of implementing your own advertising strategy is the lack of an outside point of view to tell you what messaging is going to be most attractive to your target audience. While you want to be consistent with your brand, you don’t want to run the exact same advertisements week after week, year after year. Your message will begin to blend into the background. Rather, it’s important to seek outside input to ensure you’re taking a fresh approach.

Trends and technology are ever-changing, can you keep up?

As we mentioned, business owners have enough on their plate. Can you expect to add on the task of keeping up with the latest technologies and trends in advertising? For an advertising agency, this is a part of daily business development. An agency will lend its expertise and suggest new advertising strategies that are just hitting the market. This added value can have a major impact on the success of your advertising strategy.

If you lose or change staff, your advertising strategy could suffer

While most businesses don’t anticipate turnover of staff, it happens and often at the most inconvenient times. If the person you have handling your advertising takes another job, or you decide to hire someone new, your advertising efforts may be halted in the interim. When working with an advertising agency, it’s their job to ensure your advertising always runs smoothly. There are many hands that make up your advertising team, so your efforts will never come to a screeching halt, even if they experience their own internal changes.

What has been your experience with promoting your business through advertising? Whether you’ve worked with an ad agency or have implemented your own strategy, we’d love to hear your thoughts!