When it comes to search engine marketing, you can choose to outsource or do it yourself. Either way you choose, a basic understanding of how things work is not optional. If you do not understand how things work, outsourcing or doing it yourself will still lead you to no where.
Outsourcing
You must be clear of the results you want. Do you want to generate leads so that you can follow up on the phone? Maybe you want to people to order your products on your website? Make sure the company or individual whom you are about to hire knows what to do & how to do it. They must have enough experience even if they have only done search marketing on their own websites. Your profits must cover the cost of outsourcing if not you might as well do it yourself.
Do It Yourself
It does take more time to do it yourself & the learning curve can be steep at times. With some books you can buy from Amazon.com & some other courses available online, you can learn a lot faster than trying to figure everything out all by yourself. Obviously, you can save money on hiring others & the money you saved goes into your pocket. Besides, most search engine companies are clueless about what they do & you being their customer is as good as paying to be a guinea pig.
Your Own Team
If you have figured it out yourself & you are profiting on a consistent basis, now you can document your process & build your own team to manage it for you. You still have full control & your team does most of the work for you. Since you already documented everything down, you can hire people with little experience for less money because they just need to follow your instructions & checklists, nothing more than that. As you go along, you train them so they work better for you.
Summary
Start by doing it yourself, after that you can choose to outsource to others or you can choose to build your own team.