The hybrid approach to building a world-class marketing team
Marketing is more than just posting on social media or creating visual aids (although these things can be important to an overall marketing strategy!). When done effectively, marketing adds value and increases sales. But if you aren’t a huge company with a robust marketing team, how do you get the most out of your marketing strategy to help your company meet and exceed your goals? Consider a hybrid approach.?
What's the ROI on marketing spend
First, let’s briefly talk about how marketing adds value to the team. Marketing activities can be directly related to sales metrics. Marketing contributes to website visitors, and website visits can convert to contacts, qualified leads, opportunities, and, eventually, customers.?
In addition to directly impacting the number of customers, marketing adds value to other departments. They hand over qualified leads, account strategies, and visual materials for sales. For the C-suite, marketing arms them with customer and market insights to better inform leadership decisions. They give R&D answers about what customers want so that this can be developed. Marketing helps operations and IT by centralizing all lead and customer data and conversations. And they can help finance by cutting costs and making money.?
Cost comparison of internal vs external team
So, now that we’ve established the value of marketing, let’s talk about building a team that can provide this value. For small and mid-sized companies, you may be weighing whether to create your own internal team or hire external partners.?
Cost is key when deciding whether to create an internal team or hire an external one. Let’s start with the cost of an internal team. Building a full-scale marketing team can be expensive, and it is hard to scale up and down when needed. There are many people who make up a marketing team, and while each position brings new knowledge and skills, they all have salaries, career expectations, and limitations. Here are just a few members that may be part of a marketing team and their (very conservative) average annual salaries (in the US):
These are just a few people who may make up a marketing team, and these salaries vary by years of experience and where you’re located across the country. Now, you could think about just hiring a few people to do everything, but filling positions with people who are not specialized doesn’t serve your team - it can slow things down and reduce your team’s likelihood of achieving your goals.?
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The price of external teams can vary depending on what you are looking for the agency to do and the amount of marketing support you are looking for. It may also vary monthly or quarterly if specific short-term projects require less or more spend. There is often flexibility with costs to help meet your company’s goals while sticking within your budget.?
Why is outsourcing helpful?
You want to create a marketing team with all the knowledge and skills you need without unnecessary or irrelevant services. External marketing agencies offer a full stack of skills and expertise that can be tailored to meet individual company goals. Marketing agencies provide value with their strategic marketing expertise, the diversity of their skills, and how they use this knowledge and these skills to serve as an extension of your team. Agencies can also help companies scale faster because they are able to do a broader scope of activities than a small team with a narrower, less in-depth range of skills.?
Now, you might be thinking that this sounds great, but that this external marketing team won’t know the intricacies of your industry and company. And that’s true: your team knows your company best. But what if we could get the best of both worlds? That’s why we always recommend a hybrid approach with our partners.?
Benefits of a hybrid approach
A hybrid approach combines the strengths of both internal personnel and external partners to create a skilled and knowledgeable marketing team working together to achieve your company’s goals. Your in-house team provides strategic leadership and subject matter experts who bring deep company and industry knowledge to help drive strategy and growth. The external team brings specialized marketing experts who can assist with brand strategy, content strategy, creative direction, digital lead generation, development, UX, data analysis, and more.?
With this hybrid approach to creating a marketing team, you get specialist knowledge, better quality work, and faster delivery. Using external marketing experts with an internal team of subject matter experts and generalists can help your company get more done quickly with lower costs and less overhead. This model is beneficial for midsized companies with 50+ employees or companies pulling $2 million or more in annual revenues.?
Creating a marketing team with this hybrid approach highlights the skills of both the internal and external teams to create the most impactful marketing strategy. Think of the quote, “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” But wouldn’t having masters of all trades be the best option? With this hybrid approach, you can make that happen for your team.