I personally feel as though this is going to be more the norm, than going the agency route, in many large size businesses.

Frankly, it just makes perfect sense. Who knows/cares more about your products and services than you do? Who is involved in the day-to-day marketing goal-setting changes? And finally, and certainly not lastly, who’s going to lead the company into the importance of integrating SEO, and working with social media and paid teams and be sure mobile is all tied in….and…. the list goes on. 

I just ran across an article on building and managing enterprise search marketing teams.  There are many good and smart aspects to that article and the approach many cited in the article takes. I particularly agree 100% with the dashboard idea. When you need to get your message in front of a c-level and as clearly and concisely as possible, generate a clean dashboard (and no, not in excel please, don’t make them dizzy, just inform them visually).

In my personal opinion any medium to large sized organization can do things much more efficiently by bringing your search talents in-house, manage your search marketing under your own roof and  pocket the monthly agency mgmt fees. Have those funds go right back into building and growing your search team. While it’s important to migrate search in-house from third party vendors, it’s just as important to use the right tools. There are many enterprise level tools like Brightedge, Conductor, SeoMoz, and SEOClarity - all of which I heard great things about from many in-house Search Professionals. If I didn’t mention a particular platform, it’s likely I won’t endorse it. I do like and use SEOmoz, and I would most definitely include this into your list. They also have a great educational area for those of you who’s job it is to educate your company on search.

About five years ago, you might have been able to get away with having just one person overseeing all the company’s search marketing, but now with social, mobile, universal, all joining forces as part of your overall search mix, you really should build a team of smart, proactive and hard working search professionals.