It doesn’t matter if you’ve been a marketing director for 12 months or 12 years – there is bound to come a time when your team would benefit from some outside support.
Bringing in a marketing specialist to support your team could be necessary because your work and creativity have hit a trough or plateau, and you need some outside inspiration to help motivate your team.
Or, it could be because you’re inundated with a huge project and the stress levels are way too high for your team to cope with in a healthy way, and so you look to bringing in some back up.
In that case, you might want to consider bringing on a marketing specialist.
We think of a marketing specialist as a professional who specializes in creating and implementing marketing strategies to increase visibility and grow a variety of businesses.
They excel at providing insight into consumer behavior, evaluating the effectiveness of existing strategies, and helping to develop new campaigns.
Their skill set includes creating content for marketing materials, analyzing market trends, and building brand awareness through advertising.
Their tool kit includes the ability to track metrics and performance goals, and also being able to optimize digital channels such as SEO, SEM, and Social Media platforms.
In short – they are pros at what they do and they can be a potential source of inspiration and assistance for your department.
Sound interesting?
Well, here are some things to think about, when bringing a marketing specialist on to support your department.
What are you lacking?
We always suggest doing an “internal audit” of your project or overall department needs before you look to bring anyone else on board.
Here’s a list of things to look at and see where you’re thriving, and where you’re lacking:
- Project objectives and goals – are you consistently hitting or coming close to these goals?
- Target audience and demographics – are you in the right area of demographics for your desired audience?
- Risk management of potential risks and challenges – have you thought about and planned for the “what if’s” that could trip you up later on?
- Campaign timeline and budgeting – are you on track and within budget?
- Quality of materials used in marketing efforts (brand, visuals, content) – are you using the best tools at your disposal?
- Performance metrics (traffic, conversions, ROI) – how is your project or work actually performing?
- User experience across all channels (websites, social media platforms, outdoor etc.) – are you experiencing complaints from users?
- Ability to track customer engagement & feedback – do you have a way to measure and respond to your direct audience?
Once you identify any areas in which you’re lacking, you can make a list of what skills or tools you will need to help supplement and bring these areas back on track.
Then, make sure that whatever marketing specialist you are considering to hire or contract with has all of those skills or tools that you need currently.
Otherwise, it won’t be a good match, and potentially a waste of time and money for all involved.
By identifying and writing out what you need ahead of time, you can be sure to find the right person or agency for your team, and you can make the most out of their support.
Set Expectations
As always, a little time spent on the front end to clearly lay out what’s expected of the person or agency you are bringing on can pay off exponentially in the long run.
When setting expectations, it is important to provide the marketing specialist with as much information as possible, so both you and they know what to expect.
This should include:
- the project timeline and budget
- the target audience and demographics
- performance metrics to be tracked
- campaign objectives and goals
- risk management plans for potential risks
- user experience expectations
- and customer engagement goals
- along with any other areas or issues unique to your engagement of the specialist.
In addition, make sure you set up how the lines of communication will work.
Will the specialist be able to interact with your team directly, or will only a core set of people be involved?
What if other issues pop up while they’re on board – will they be able to add help in those areas to their existing scope of work, or will you both need to step back and assess prior to moving forward in another area?
Having a clear understanding of the expectations upfront can help avoid any confusion later on for you, your team, and the specialist, and will ensure that any future collaboration you do together will be successful.
Cost Benefit Analysis
After you’ve identified areas of lack and set your expectations, you’ll need to run a cost benefit analysis.
That is – will hiring this specialist on for support really be a good financial investment for our department and company?
Once again, this involves sitting down and doing some pre-planning.
You will need to evaluate how much it will cost to bring this person or agency on board versus how much of a return on investment it is likely to generate.
This analysis should include the amount of time and resources your team will save by bringing on external help, as well as any additional value that specialist might bring to the project.
Which means you’ll need to run the projections of how much your team will spend by not bringing on a specialist and continuing on as usual.
Then compare the raw data and make sure you’re actually saving money – or at least not losing money – by bringing on the marketing specialist to support your team.
Another helpful step is to take some extra time to evaluate the long-term sustainability of the cost benefit analysis.
This means considering if hiring a specialist now will provide optimal value in terms of their schedule and skill sets for the long run, rather than just short-term assistance.
How to find the right specialist
Now that you’ve identified what you need and have a plan to get your specialist on track and in sync with your team, how do you go about finding one?
It’s always a good choice to start with your local network – maybe ask around on LinkedIn or other channels of colleagues who may need to use a similar specialist.
Of course, if you’re head of a corporate marketing department, your network may only consist of competitors and they are not likely to share their specialist with you.
In that case, you can search for agencies or individual specialists both locally and internationally, using the skill sets you need as search terms.
Read reviews, if available, and make sure you are comfortable with the specialist before bringing them on board.
By taking the time to properly evaluate any potential specialist you may work with, you can ensure that you are making a sound investment in your marketing efforts.
Then you will know you have a specialist on board who can truly provide value for your team.
Doing so will ultimately save you time, money, and resources.
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