Marketing Automation Implementation: Agency vs In-House Approach
Marketing automation implementation is one of the most critical steps in transforming your digital operations. It’s where strategy turns into real customer journeys, data pipelines, and automated campaigns.
Also, what I’ve learned from experience is that the most crucial factor in deciding how to implement your marketing automation depends on your current situation. Are you just getting started, or do you already send campaigns regularly? Do you already have something built on another platform that you’ve outgrown? What CRM are you using – or are there plans to introduce one soon?
These questions determine whether you should go in-house, work with an agency, or combine both approaches. Let’s explore how each model works – and which one fits your organization best.
The In-House Approach
Building an internal marketing automation team gives you complete control over data, processes, and tools.
It’s ideal for organizations that already have mature digital infrastructure and plan to scale automation across multiple channels or regions.
Advantages
- Full data ownership – No third parties handling sensitive customer information.
- Long-term expertise – Your team develops hands-on platform knowledge.
- Faster iterations – You can test and adapt campaigns without agency coordination.
- Lower ongoing costs – After initial setup and training, operational expenses are limited to staff salaries.
Challenges
- High upfront cost – Hiring and training specialists in tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Adobe Campaign can be expensive.
- Limited expertise breadth – Internal teams might specialize in one platform or area (e.g., email), missing cross-platform know-how.
- Longer implementation timeline – Building workflows, integrations, and governance internally takes time.
- Limited platform flexibility – The fewer specialists you have, the fewer platforms you can realistically choose from. Implementing a complex enterprise tool like Salesforce Marketing Cloud usually requires more time and technical depth compared to a lighter platform such as Braze. At the very least, you’ll need one experienced specialist to lead the implementation, whose learning curve for new technologies won’t be as steep.
The Agency Approach
Partnering with a marketing automation agency means leveraging established technical and strategic expertise.
Agencies often bring pre-tested frameworks, certified specialists, and implementation experience across multiple ecosystems. They also tend to have industry-specific know-how, meaning they’ve likely implemented similar setups for companies in your sector — whether it’s banking, retail, or SaaS. This allows them to anticipate challenges, follow proven patterns, and deliver results faster.
Advantages
- Speed to market – Agencies can launch automation within weeks thanks to existing experience.
- Cross-platform experience – From Salesforce, Adobe, Braze or Bloomreach, agencies know best practices.
- Strategic oversight – Most agencies help with journey mapping, segmentation logic, and content personalization.
- Access to enterprise integrations – Especially useful for connecting CRM, e-commerce, and analytics platforms.
Challenges
- Less control – You depend on external teams for configuration and maintenance.
- Ongoing costs – Agencies typically charge retainers or hourly rates.
- Knowledge gap – Once the agency leaves, your team might not know how to maintain the system.
Hybrid Approach: Best of Both Worlds
Many successful companies adopt a hybrid model:
- Use an agency for setup, architecture, and initial campaign design.
- Gradually transition to in-house management for ongoing execution and optimization.
This way, you combine external expertise with internal control.
It’s especially effective when implementing advanced platforms such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Adobe Campaign, where technical onboarding can be complex.
For setup, the process usually starts with a series of discovery meetings to understand your current marketing automation environment and define your ideal future state. This includes identifying whether you plan to add a CRM, integrate your existing platform with one using simple flat-file exchanges, or introduce a dedicated integration layer.
In more complex architectures, your technical team or solution architect might even propose message queues or event-based pipelines to handle real-time data exchange between systems.
However, each new technology adds both cost and complexity to the ecosystem. While integrations can bring scalability and automation, they also require ongoing maintenance, monitoring, and governance — which should always be factored into your implementation plan.
