HOW TO SCALE YOUR MARKETING FAST WITH NO ADDITIONAL HEADCOUNT

As a marketing manager, you are responsible to grow the market share of your company’s products, services or solutions. Your marketing KPI may vary but usually ties to a set of numbers. It could be the number of leads generated, newsletter sign-ups, website visitors or Facebook page followers.

Here is a typical scenario.  In achieving those KPIs, you need to spend a lot of time planning, running, tracking and analyzing each marketing campaign that you launch. A rockstar marketing campaign requires multi-tasking, detailed and deep knowledge abilities.  To reach out to audiences using multiple channels, all those abilities are highly important. Then, there is the time needed for tracking and merging the results obtained from those channels.  And you would also need to be very analytical to determine the next move.

Deadlines and long to-do-lists may be routine to you. If you are already grappling on a daily fire-fighting mode, it is high time you make your distress call.

Ask yourself these:

• Am I not able to do things according to my ideal plan?
• Do I have the challenge to justify or prove my marketing dollars spent on achieving ROIs?
• Do I always feel so short-handed with staff?
• Am I strugglingto keep up with the latest developments in marketing technologies?

Then, it is about time you considered outsourcing some parts of your marketing to a marketing agency.  Here is a list of marketing tasks that you should consider outsourcing to an external agency if you do not have the suitable manpower or skillset to do it in-house:

1. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – paid traffic
2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – organic traffic
3. Social Media Marketing
4. Blog Writing / Content Marketing
5. Email Marketing
6. Lead Generation Landing Pages – sales funnels, promotion
7. Branding, Awareness, Media Planning and Buying
8. Corporate Event Management
9. Telemarketing
10. Marketing Store, Inventory and Logistics

Why not work smarter? You do not have to be good at everything.

Start engaging the service of a marketing agency equipped with a multi-skilled marketing team: qualified social media marketers, SEO specialists, designers, copywriters, web developers and others.

You can choose to work with an agency offering project-based or retainer-based services. An agency retainer model refers to an agreement between a business and an agency to work together. Both parties will work on a specific area based on a pre-agreed rate over a fixed period of time. This can last for 6 months, 12 months or even 24 months. And you can negotiate for monthly payments instead of paying upfront.

By hiring an agency on retainer basis, you will have access to an extended team immediately. And the team will assist you in specific areas of marketing. If the agreement with the agency permits, you may get the team to sit in your internal meeting. As such, your product or sales manager will be able to participate in the first-hand briefing on the business objective. This ensures the extended team understands your business thoroughly and is able to formulate a sound marketing plan for you. For the execution part, the extended team takes over this role for you. And subsequently, the team will monitor the results against the marketing goals that you have set. Thus, you get your precious time back to work on more strategic tasks.

However, if you foresee only a need for some extra help to launch a new product or run a seasonal campaign, you may opt for a marketing service charged on project basis. With a project-based model, the agency invoices you based on per project work. If you want an agency to set up a Google Ad campaign or produce social media posts, the agency will quote you a price. Besides that, they will give you a timeline (agreed-upon by you and them) to complete the job. This also serves as an opportunity to 'test drive' the agency.  After the first campaign has ended, you will be able to evaluate if the agency is a proper fit to work with over a longer period of time.

Conclusion

No one is good at everything. Outsourcing some parts of your marketing to an agency will free up your time to focus on other important matters. This is especially on formulating and fine-tuning your marketing strategies for better results. From there on, you can use the time saved to do market research, strategic planning, post-campaign analysis, performance metrics review and management reporting.

If you would like to discuss how a marketing agency could help you with your overwhelming workload or improving your marketing ROI, let us talk!