Should you hire a marketing agency or in-house employees? Do you need a team of contractors to bring your digital strategy to speed? What’s the best marketing team mix to serve your company’s needs now and in the future? This blog post, a recap of a recent Found Friday episode, will touch on the pros and cons of various types of marketing teams, and best practices for building your marketing workforce: from contracts, agencies, full-time employees, or something else entirely.
I’ve worked in all of these types of teams
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and there’s no “one best team” type. But, I can talk about some of the pros and cons of agencies, in-house employees, contractors, and a mixed-model approach.
A great team should cover the full marketing ecosystem. This isn’t about having just a good social media team or SEO team: you need someone in charge of short-term campaigns, as well as long-term reputation management and branding. One solution may not fit all of your needs, so keep in mind that most companies work with a varied set of teams. Let’s look at the main types of marketing teams: agency, in-house, contractor, and hybrid.
Types of marketing teams
Agency
Agencies tend to fall into two categories: full-service or specialized. If you’re considering hiring a marketing agency, think about scope.
A full-service agency will handle all aspects of your strategy: graphic design, branding, social media, content creation, digital strategy, email marketing, and everything else your brand needs. For most orgs, hiring a full-service agency means hiring the marketing agency – the single entity that will handle the entire strategy. Because full-service agencies typically charge a hefty retainer, they tend to serve large and enterprise-level clients..
Specialized agencies focus on a specific piece of the marketing ecosystem, either because the agency has specialized experience or because the organization has chosen to farm out a specific task, such as media buying and planning, SEO, social media or email. Specialized agencies may be smaller, or an organization may choose to hire a larger agency to work in a particular function area. Larger organizations may have several specialized agencies managed by in-house marketing teams.
In-house
In-house teams may consist of a team of specialists, or a hierarchy of specialists, generalists and supervisors.
Specialists address specific needs, usually bringing practical experience or high-level skills to the project. Specialists may be subject matter experts, or simply experts at performing a specific function, like influencer marketing, email or SEO. Orgs may choose to have multiple experts of the same type working together, breaking down the specialization further – for example, holding both a structural SEO specialist and an SEO content creator.
Generalists typically work across multiple task types within a single team, or across multiple teams. They may report on multiple KPIs, or have titles indicating a wider groups of objectives – these are your “content marketing” or “inbound marketing” folks. In smaller organizations, marketing professionals may find it necessary to wear multiple hats; in larger organizations, generalists tend to work on holistic, whole-brand marketing.
Marketing managers or supervisors oversee the execution of marketing functions. They’re generally responsible for making strategy decisions, and for team communication within the function group. There are also lots of working managers – who may both supervise teams and personally perform a hybrid of generalized and specialized tasks.
Contractor
Third-party contractors typically fall into three major categories: full-time, part-time and project-based.
The typical reason for using a full-time contractor is that an organization has a long-term project, but it cannot justify adding the overhead and salary of full-time employees to the project’s budget. A contractor dedicated full-time to a project will act somewhat as an extension of the team, and may even work from the organization’s office. You may want to test out a contractor’s aptitude and, when a bigger project becomes available, onboard that person as a full-time employee. However, some organizations run teams comprised entirely of full-time contractors managed by employees of the company.
Part-time contractors are typically used for projects that don’t create a sufficient workload to justify a full-time contractor or full-time employee. Smaller organizations may find part-timers useful for smaller projects, or bigger orgs may use a variety of part-time contractors because they need a variety of voices. For example, if you have an ongoing need for content creators, designers or social media influencers, but the workload for each is under forty hours per week, using part-time contractors may be a good way to go.
Project-based contractors are brought on for short-term needs with a definite start and end point. Temporary contractors might also be used for.
One of the first things
we learn as children is how to share. Letting our friends and classmates use our toys and crayons is rightfully championed. Sharing is caring. So why do we end up forgetting all about this once we step into our professional lives? Instead of freely sharing between teams, too many organizations keep their data close to the vest. Individuals and teams alike hide their buy phone number data knowledge from the others at the company that could really benefit. This can be a major downfall for your content creation and marketing strategy. Without the right data on which to base your choices, your campaigns can end up falling flat time and again. You may also end up leaving opportunities on the table because you don’t have all the information.
In our recent episode of Found Friday, a weekly series dedicated to all things data in content marketing, search, and digital, we took on the topic of data collection and sharing and how the right kind of data can inform your marketing strategy in a huge way. There are a lot of reasons that your data sharing strategy may be lacking at the moment, but as you’ll see, getting on board with more transparency, better data collection processes, and definitive marketing goals is worth the investment.
Why Data Sharing is a Good Idea
When we talk about data sharing, we don’t mean giving your social security number to a long lost relative. We’re talking about internal numbers and patterns that are derived from your digital marketing efforts.
And if the idea of data sharing isn’t immediately attractive to you, that’s okay. You might not realize how important it is to have strategic organizational transparency into your marketing data.
Sharing data between teams offers your organization a range of benefits (outlined below) but what it really comes down it is allowing the organization to make strategic marketing choices that are based on all the available information rather than jumping to conclusions about which strategy, channels, and messages won’t work for you. More on that later.
For now, keep in mind that effective data sharing within your organization does the following:
Promotes consistent efforts toward common goals
Allows for accurate measurement of cause and effect across your entire organization
Helps effectively assess trends and outliers
Ensures data that is being shared is done so easily and allows for effective use of that data
Supports the creation of strategic messaging, content, and metrics
Has a positive impact on your bottom line
These impacts can be far-reaching, offering benefits to individuals, teams, and to the organization as a whole.
Let’s go a little deeper into each of these benefits.
Promoting Consistent Efforts towards Common Goals
As you’ll learn a little later on, our data measurement and sharing process starts with defining campaign goals. By being explicit about what you are trying to achieve, not only does performance measurement become much easier, but organizational goals stay top of mind for everyone.
Accurate Measurement of Cause and Effect
Every campaign, whether it’s a seasonal sale, a new product launch, or a brand awareness push has effects that ripple throughout the organization. When you take the bank email list time to create a clear picture of your marketing data, it becomes much easier to trace a line between one action, message, or deliverable and a positive or negative effect. This is the key way that tracking and sharing data helps you to make better, more informed choices.
Effectively Assessing Trends and Outliers
Much like identifying causes and their effects, thoughtful data can make patterns that much clearer and can help you to see which outcomes are anomalies.
Ensuring Effective Use of Data
Organizations that track and share data regularly can more regularly and easily turn that data into actionable insights. It is not enough to collect information if it is not then acted on intelligently.
Supporting the Creation of Strategic Messaging, Content & Metrics
The more you know about how your messaging and content performs across platforms and mediums, the more informed choices you can make about how to invest your resources for better content. Particularly on small marketing teams, you have extremely limited time. Using good data to prioritize will save time, yielding an increase in marketing performance and a happier content creation team.
Positively Impacting the Bottom Line
Without a positive impact on revenue, there would be no underlying drive to collect and share data effectively. Better data and better data sharing together can mean more strategic marketing decisions. You can spend less for better results.
Common Obstacles to Effective Data Sharing
While there can be a host of reasons that companies are reluctant or even hostile to data sharing strategies, the three most common stem from a lack of process and an underlying fear.
First, many organizations do not promote data sharing. They may not be openly hostile to the idea
