What is an external marketing department and why is it the best thing that can happen to your business? Full disclosure: Yes, we are an external marketing team. It’s what we do and we do it well, so get ready to read the most important marketing content you’ll ever read.
We are living at a crazy time. Platforms are built and fail on a daily basis; perfect campaigns stop working without warning and endless discussions and speculation abound about where an audience is today and where it will be tomorrow. New tools are introduced and others disappear. It’s an endless race that only seems to be intensifying.
Amidst the craziness of the endless options and areas that the marketing world is expanding into, we learn again and again how little room there is for half-baked efforts or amateurs who produce unclear results. We are continuously reminded of the benefits received when every task is completed by someone who specializes in that area. But that’s not always realistic for many businesses – and that’s the precise issue that an external marketing department can solve for you.
What is an external marketing team?
An external marketing department is essentially the ongoing use of professionals, each a specialist in his own arena, in the volume of work that suits you – just like delegating out any other task that you can’t perform yourself (or just isn’t the best to do yourself). Instead of employing 5 full-time experts in your company or paying 5 separate professionals who produce different results, you get to enjoy having an entire department of people working together entirely in sync.
This solution is appropriate for certain kinds of companies: small or medium sized companies with no marketing department or others who maintain marketing departments that focus on very specific topics but want to expand to other areas. This is a perfect service for companies that want to sink their teeth into a new and complex project, which includes working with a few professionals in parallel, especially when time is of the essence.
If your company falls anywhere in these descriptions, you’ll enjoy several big benefits from working with an external marketing department. Here are a few of them:
1. One position, many roles
You might have the best marketing manager in the world, but he will never be an expert in all the tools that are relevant to you. If you want precise results, you have to make sure that every tool you use is being run by a specialist in that area.
2. See the entire picture
Being hands on is an important part of a marketing manager’s job. But when his head is deep in a campaign, it’s very difficult to get a view of the full picture and, more importantly, to manage it. If you want perfect results, you need professionals and someone to manage them.
3. Targeted results
The truth is that it’s easiest to report to yourself. There will always be excuses and there’s always tomorrow. But when you’re on the receiving end of a service, you are committed to a contract and there’s no room for flexibility.
4. Being where you need to be, not where it’s comfortable to be
Everyone specializes in different areas and most of the time they go with the flow in whatever direction is most comfortable and not necessarily where you actually need to be. Managing a professional company means knowing all the options available and continuously keeping yourself informed of all updates while knowing how to choose the right directions for your brand.
5. Complete customer journey – offline as well as on
And where is your audience in all this? With all due respect to the digital world, they are still getting up every morning, leaving the house for work, stopping for and visiting the supermarket on their way back home. Where are you meeting them in this whole process? Centralized management of your marketing allows us to create an entire customer journey for you that touches on all the places where your audience meets you, even those that aren’t digital.
6. Taking full advantage of a marketing budget
Most companies divvy up their marketing budget ahead of time between various efforts once a year without any flexibility. Centralized management of a marketing budget allows you to maintain a marketing budget with a pulse, continuously making changes that fit real-world observations and using the same budget to achieve more.
7. Maintain consistency and a uniform brand language
When you employ an endless number of professionals and try to connect all the dots to make one coherent picture, it’s nearly impossible. Every individual sees things slightly differently and unless you supply very specific briefs to your suppliers, you create a confusing brand with a few different identities and no connection between all the platforms you use or the reality on the ground.
8. Costs
In order to employ an entire marketing department, you need an unimaginable budget. The alternative of maintaining an entire department for the price of one person is very attractive. That’s how it is when you don’t need to pay for human resources: you only pay for results.
9. Availability
Even if you have a great marketing manager who knows everything, what do you do when you have a problem or you need to reply to something here and now and he’s not available? You can never rely on a single anchor.
10. From moment to moment
One of the situations we encounter most often is when a company wants to tackle a large project but doesn’t have enough resources. This usually happens when you want to jump-start a new process or when a few projects are going at the same time and you need to see results in the immediate future. Recruiting people will take at least 3 months including onboarding and training. We do onboarding for clients in 14 days. That’s how it is when you have proper system in place.
How will you know if it’s right for you?
Those are the main reasons for hiring an external marketing department that we are often asked about, but there’s a lot more besides. If you’re interested and think it might be a good fit for your company, contact us and we’ll think about it together.