Brands are moving digital and social media marketing efforts in-house more than ever before.While more and more of marketing is being done by these in-house marketing teams, new-age software solutions like Pixlee, offer huge value and stability when creating social media and user-generated content integrations on owned media.

Back in November of 2014, there was an article written on CMO.com that captured the shift in brand marketing landscape very well. Here are the key takeaways from the piece:

• “Insourcing is on fire because as data and technology become more relevant and increase efficiencies, brands are expected to be more accountable”
• Control over analytics gives marketers a more objective way to measure and compare across all their vendors.

With the pace of digital, social media, and craze for high-quality omnichannel marketing, the digital marketer has become one of the most important and entrepreneurial roles in marketing.

Today, there is an ongoing conversation around nearly every sub-discipline of marketing, as to what should be done in-house and when marketers should leverage an outsource marketing model.When it comes to social and user-generated content integrations, marketers should avoid building in-house solutions. Here’s why:

‍(1) It’s incredibly expensive. Why build something from scratch that already has been built before? Most marketers aren’t developers, and every chance your team gets to not need extra in-house development resources is money saved. Not to mention when it comes to large-scale integrations of UGC, it’s not as simple as just publishing content on your website. Getting things built right, and having a platform to manage your integration allows your team to focus on strategy and deployment rather than technical implementation.(

2) There’s a significant development cost to maintain. It’s not just about initial development resources because social media is not static. As platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. all evolve and update their own platforms and APIs, your integration must evolve too. With updates happening unexpectedly and incredibly frequently, having a software resource to manage that integration allows your team to focus on what matters, the marketing.

‍(3) User rights are important. Using social media information and user-generated content is a powerful way to humanize your brand voice, promote customer and fan engagement, and provide powerful social proof for your brand. Though, it also adds a new layer to your content marketing; legal & ownership rights. To publish customer-generated social content, it is imperative that your brand adheres to the rights regulations of different social platforms. Like maintenance of integration, rights management is a moving target as platforms update their terms of service and require social content to be displayed and attributed in specific ways. Having a platform to help gain permission of use, and display content correctly, and manage rights, allows your team to be agile in their use of social media content and UGC.

‍(4) Customer photos are valuable omnichannel assets. The last huge reason that UGC integrations shouldn't be done in-house is that the lifespan and value of customer photos extend beyond any one integration. As brands have success displaying customer photos on their website or social, there will only be more and more integrations to come. It is important to have a platform that allows you to publish customer photos across multiple channels and track and optimize performance across those different locations. This will allow your team to be agile in collecting, curating, and leveraging UGC into more places like mobile, ads, email, or brick-n-mortar retail without the cost of new integration and development.

Marketing platforms like Pixlee are a large reason why so much of brand marketing has been able to be moved in-house. The wide breadth of software solutions today helps scrappy in-house social and digital marketing teams stay lean and efficient, manage multiple channels, initiatives, and track and measure performance easier than ever. These platforms are dramatically changing the way major brand marketing teams are structured.It is important to understand what types of things should be done in house, and what things should leverage a vendor, agency, or consultant. At Pixlee, we take the operational obstacles of social and UGC integration off the hands of your in-house teams and make it easier to focus on what you are best at-- marketing.