Hiring was already hard enough before, but we’re facing next-level challenges with hiring and retaining talent during this age of the Great Resignation. If your marketing team has felt the sting from this, it is probably a great time to re-evaluate your approach to marketing and how you build the team that makes it happen. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t require more painful hours spent on Indeed.
Building an internal marketing team depends on finding the top people with the top skills. You need team members that have a deep understanding of your brand in and out, apply best practices in marketing, and how to use top channels to help drive your company’s bottom line. Oh, and also someone who also wants to wear 5+ different hats all day, every day.
To put it simply, employing the best people for an effective marketing team is hard. And costly. It takes a significant amount of time and money to find candidates, interview, onboard, train, etc. It can be a very long, drawn-out, and frustrating experience especially now. Plus, they may require desk space, health insurance, and benefits.
You see that we are a marketing company, so you probably assume we’re going to make a strong argument as to why you should outsource your marketing to an amazing partner (wink, wink). Outsourcing all of your marketing can be a lot more cost-effective when you compare it to the cost of hiring a full-time employee with benefits. But that’s not what we’re here to suggest exactly.
In-House VS. Outsourcing? What About Option Three?
We’re here to recommend another option. Times are changing and so are traditional teams and work models. It’s less about doing things just because that’s how we’ve always done them and how everyone else does them and more about doing things in the most efficient way to smash your goals. So our approach? Fill the gaps in your in-house marketing team with an external marketing partner. It’s not choosing one or the other. It’s having both.
Maybe it feels disloyal? Or maybe your current team might feel threatened by the new marketing partner. It’s not disloyal and it’s not pinning the in-house team versus the external marketing company. It’s identifying the strengths of both and having everyone work within those. This frees up the time, frustration, and capacity of your current team so your company can become cutting edge while working on things that bring in the most revenue.
There are a lot of pros that come from having a marketing person on your team that lives and breathes your brand and its mission.
However, unless you have a large marketing team (and let’s be real, tons of in-house marketing departments are on the back of just one or two people), an internal team just can’t do it all. Or maybe they can but for how long? And at what cost? If it costs their patience, fulfillment at work, or even leads them to leave for another role, it’s not worth it. Let’s not forget to mention how it can be difficult to think outside of the business at new opportunities and strategies when your team is so focused on fulfilling the in-house marketing activities.
To maximize your existing team’s abilities without maxing out your spending plan, it may be time to consider a hybrid strategy for marketing.
A hybrid marketing group (a group made up of your in-house team members plus specialists from a marketing company) can make you more flexible. It also gives you the financial flexibility to scale your company faster, much more effectively than hiring full-time employees who specialize in what you need (all on your own time and money).
How Do You Start Building A Hybrid Team?
To determine the very best means to create your hybrid advertising method, start with your current team. Identify the people who have designated roles (and do them well). Then think about where they might fall short, either because of time, budget, or knowledge constraints.
Here’s an example:
Anne is good at writing blogs, but doesn’t have knowledge on optimizing for SEO. Lauren enjoys posting on social, but doesn’t understand strategy. Bob can do website development, but lacks knowledge of SEO and how to optimize the site for Google.
You have a writer, a social media person, and a web design person. This actually covers a lot for an in-house team.
But one major thing that’s missing is strategy. The team is missing a content strategist—somebody that can give a rhyme and reason to what the writer and social media person are doing. Someone who can take the lead and make the effort all worth it.
We’re not saying it’s easy to fill in these gaps. And unless you have someone like a CMO dedicated to this, it can be almost impossible. In that case, your starting point should be to get the conversation going. Speak to a professional. Figure out what a rockstar marketing team can look like and what it can do for your company when you have a stacked team of specialists regardless of whether they’re in-house or external.
It’s time to redefine and rebuild for the sake of growth. You in?