For effective marketing, you’ll have to have a budget and resources, which includes people and technology and other supplies. People-wise, marketing skills can vary a lot. Many businesses these days tend to need marketing skills in the digital space, but even when you think about digital marketing, it’s a really wide area. Expertise can range from social media to SEO to web design. Aligning the skills and expertise you need with the resources you have is a delicate balance.
When you’re thinking about how to market and build a marketing team for your business, consider these three options:
1. In-house staff
If you are going to hire in-house, get an employee with the widest possible range of marketing skills, plus deeper expertise with the specific types of marketing you believe are valuable for your business. The good thing about hiring in-house is your employee will learn about your business inside-out. They’ll be aligned to your long-term success and have a bigger sense of ownership. However, the cost to hire and retain in-house staff can be significant.
2. Freelancers/contractors
If the cost to hire in-house is a concern, then consider a freelancer or contractor. The nice thing here is they can be hired on a per-project or per-campaign basis and have short-term roles. Plus, because they’re not employees, you don’t have to take into account things such as benefits, payroll taxes and holidays. Those are all good reasons to work with freelancers and contractors, but on the flip side, it may mean the person you’re working with has multiple clients, and they’re not able to be as aligned with your company and what you need as much as you would like.
3. Marketing agency
Using a marketing agency is a halfway house, if you’re not ready to commit to an FTE, but you need more than just a contractor. With an agency team, you’ll get multiple skills and specialty areas, which can be important if you need to cover various spaces in marketing, and you want a strategy that is multipronged and needs expertise in those different areas. The cons here are that while agency prices can vary, a lot of them can be quite expensive. You might find yourself getting into a high fixed or semi-fixed cost every month. Really to do your homework on any agency to find out what their track record is for success and in mapping out a forecast around what revenue you can realistically expect to achieve with that team, so you can do a cost-benefit analysis.
If you’re about to embark on a big marketing spend, and you’re not sure which option for building your team is right for you, call me. I’m happy to help.