Supplementing your marketing department is a great way to increase the effectiveness of your business’s overall marketing strategy.
Supplementing means hiring an outside designer or professional to fill in some gaps in your skill sets and knowledge.
Not only do you have your home team that you can count on, but now you can expand without hopping through the corporate red tape in a flexible way to really boost your productivity and morale.
However, as with any big decision, there are some important thing to think about when supplementing your marketing department.
Key points to consider:
- Utilization – How will you practically use the extra help or support?
- Cause and Effect – How will this support affect you in the short and long term?
- Defining Lanes – How will the work be divided up among the teams?
- Strategies to Handle Workload – How can you use the support to help your workload and not add to it?
- Throughput / Flow Rate – How can you maximize your throughput/flow rate with this extra support?
- Process Optimization – How can you get the most bang for your buck?
Utilization
How will you practically use the extra help or support?
One main way to utilize the extra support for your marketing department is to deploy workers where the workflow is the most stuck.
If you know that an area of your project is going to have your team working overtime, go ahead and use the extra help to supplement the work your team is already doing, and keep them fresh and from being overworked.
Another way to effectively utilize a marketing support team is to provide expertise on specific projects – like graphic design or branding – that may be outside of the scope of the in-house team’s abilities.
This could range from creative tasks such as designing and developing websites, to strategic tasks such as advising on strategies for reaching target audiences or optimizing campaigns.
This will allow you the freedom and flexibility to take on more types of marketing projects than you may be comfortable with otherwise.
Having somebody to call when you need a hand is essential in any marketing department.
When it comes to supplementing the team, having additional resources available is important, and just knowing you can call someone will help alleviate stress on your whole team.
It can also be a source to provide valuable insight and ease the stress of tight deadlines.
Knowing where to place the support and when is a key point to getting the most out of your standby team.
Cause and Effect
How will this support affect you in the short and long term?
The ripple effect of bringing in a marketing support team can be multifaceted.
For example, in the short-term, making this move can provide immediate help with backlogged projects that could not be completed in the allotted time frame.
This can also help when a project goes wrong due to underperformance.
The obvious effect is that it allows your marketing department to maintain their current production schedule and keep projects moving forward to completion.
A not-so-obvious effect is the sigh of relief your team feels in the short-term, knowing they have backup with these backlogged or underperforming projects.
In the long-term, you boost the morale of your team, since they know you’ve got their back by having your support team on standby in case you need to call for backup.
The effects of this move will be felt long after you’ve utilized the services of your marketing support team.
In contrast, if you did not bring on extra help when the team needed it the most, the long-term effects would be negative, with team distrust and high burnout rates.
Making a move, though small in the short-term, can majorly affect your long-term team health and output.
Defining Lanes
How will the work be divided up among the teams?
Before you even bring on a support team, it’s important to go over the overarching project in detail, and assign who is responsible for what work and tasks.
This will help you have clearly defined lanes for all involved to work in and thrive.
No need to have any toes stepped on, when a little bit of foresight and planning can prevent it.
By creating boundaries and lanes for each team (internal and external) and establishing expectations, you will help ensure that each team knows who is responsible for what, and prevent any confusion or misunderstandings occurring during the process.
If you don’t have properly defined lanes, tasks can end up overlapping and become muddied, making it difficult to measure progress.
Once you have established the roles of each team and their members, make sure any deadlines or expectations are clearly communicated to all sides.
Doing so makes for a smoother workflow that both teams can track and understand.
Having an understanding of the timeline will help ensure both sides stay on track as well.
Strategies to Handle Workload
How can you use the support to help your workload and not add to it?
Similar to our theme in the last point, when it comes to strategies for handling overwhelming work requirements in a marketing department, the key is to plan ahead and be prepared.
Although the concept is very simple, it’s amazing how much return you get for the simple investment of pre-planning and being prepared.
Here’s a list of things that can help you to pre-plan the work ahead of time, so you’re not facing double-work by adding a support team to the mix:
1. Break down the project into smaller tasks
2. Prioritize tasks based on importance and urgency
3. Create a timeline for completing each task
4. Delegate tasks to specific teams and team members
5. Utilize collaboration tools to stay organized and track progress
6. Set realistic deadlines with some extra cushion time built in
7. Reschedule times as needed if something takes longer than expected
8. Review your workflow regularly and look for areas of improvement
Make sure to have a forum where you are able to facilitate open and often communication between the teams.
Check in regularly.
If you find yourself doing double-work across teams, jump in to see where the break-down in communication and allocation is, and go from there.
Throughput / Flow Rate
How can you maximize your throughput/flow rate with this extra support?
It’s no surprise that having an extra marketing support team at the ready can be a great way to bring in additional resources and help your marketing department increase its throughput.
You’ll gain access to specialized skills that may not exist within your own organization, as well as free up resources for more important projects.
With the extra help, you can have faster completion of tasks, increased productivity and higher quality results.
Additionally, since it’s on an “as-needed” basis, having this team ready to go makes it easier to scale up or down depending on the needs of the project so that you don’t have too many resources when they’re not needed, or too few when they are needed.
One of the best ways to ensure consistent throughput in production with limited resources is to plan ahead and build a system for forecasting and tracking demand for the services you provide.
Then you’ll know before it happens so you’re not scrambling to find a website to hire a designer at the last minute.
This will help you determine when external assistance may be necessary in order to meet expectations.
Once again – pre-planning and preparedness are the best way to make the most of your support team.
Process Optimization
How can you get the most bang for your buck?
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the best way to optimize your use of the external support team is to pre-plan and know your processes.
What does your regular workflow look like?
How does a project usually go, from start to finish?
Where will your extra team fit in?
How will you communicate?
At the End of the Day
Knowing ahead of time and preparing are the best ways to get the most for your teamwork.
And as problems or issues arise, have a process in place to report these hiccups and deal with them.
Then, add those solutions you implemented back into your regular processes.
By having this constant feedback loop, you’ll be able to not only win with your current projects, but you’ll come out even more ahead for your future projects – regardless of whether or not you use any outside help.
We’ve found that this helps us in our processes at our Atlanta office, and hope it has helped you, too.
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