The other day, I was on a marketing audit with a potential customer. Let's call him Jim.

He'd paid a marketing agency a ton of money to give him a slick-looking website that essentially said nothing. You know the type — lots of images of perfectly diverse groups of people smiling and high-fiving each other.

It didn't establish his credibility or cement his authority. It didn't tell me what he did, who he worked with, or how it would make their lives better.

And this wasn't the first time a marketing agency had failed him.

"We've worked with so many different marketing people over the years. They all seem to say the same thing. Keep posting stuff on social media. But they don't really know what we do, and this means we're not talking to our customers."

That's why I told him to bring his marketing in-house and do less stuff.

Peter Drucker famously said, "Business only has two basic functions, marketing and innovation. Everything else is a cost."

It can be tempting to outsource your marketing to an agency, but consider this:

1. They'll never know your product or business as well as you do, nor care about it as much as you do. So you could waste thousands of dollars on tactics that won't work because they never took the time to understand you and figure out what makes your customers tick.
2. You're helping the agency build its intellectual property (IP). Not yours. That means every time you end the relationship with one agency and start with another. You're back to square one.
3. You're one of many clients on their books. You're one of the many clients on their books. If you're not shelling out millions of dollars on advertising, you won't be their top priority, so you probably won't get the results you deserve.
4. Most agencies earn an advertising commission, so they'll often encourage you to spend a ton of money even if it's not in your best interest.

Marketing is something you want to own because it will make your business more valuable.

When you bring your marketing in-house...

• Every dollar you spend benefits your business.
• You keep all the marketing know-how (IP) inside your business.
• You build a dedicated team whose sole focus is to make your business more successful.
• You increase the value of your business to potential investors.
• You know exactly what you do, so wouldn't that make you the best person to educate customers?

How will you start taking control of your own marketing?