What’s your marketing challenge today? An outdated brand that no longer fits the vision or personality of your company? Maybe you are tasked with ongoing marketing planning and execution to drive your strategic objectives. Or it could be that you have a new product or service launch, a growth initiative, a merger, or some other event in your future that requires marketing support.
Whatever situation you face, you need to decide whether your marketing will be handled solely by an internal team or whether you will augment your marketing efforts via outsourcing. How do you weigh what is right for you?
Internal teams come with the perception of increased control and lower costs, but assembling a team with the breadth of skills, expertise, and resource availability you need may be beyond your budget. Alternatively, if you choose to outsource, you can gain access to a broad and deep pool of skills, specialists, expertise, industry knowledge, and experience that are difficult to duplicate internally.
In this article, we’ll examine what you can gain by working with a partner and how outsourcing can help you achieve a better ROI for your marketing spend.
Augment Your Internal Capabilities
To plan successful marketing strategies and execute meaningful marketing tactics, a variety of skills are required. It is important to not only have all the skills, but to also have enough people with the time to execute them. While many companies have extremely talented marketing teams, having a depth of skills across a variety of areas is rare.
For optimal results, your marketing team needs to provide you with:
- Strategy, Positioning, and Messaging: You’ll first need insightful market intelligence to fully understand your position compared to your competitors. With this information, an experienced strategist who has worked in and understands your company’s industry, audience, and objectives can develop the strategic plans that differentiate you from competitors and enable you to meet your objectives.
- Creative Content and Visuals: It requires skilled writers to craft fresh content that tells your company’s story with an eye on the buyer’s journey. You will also need talented graphic designers to make you visually stand out from your competition and support your core messaging.
- Impeccable Execution: To round out your marketing program, it will be important to have teams that deliver quality web development, digital services, trade show execution, customer outreach and engagement, media buying, public relations, social media, and more.
- Accountability: Performance, quality, and on-time and on-budget work are all essential to your results.
Reduce Overhead
The size of your marketing team will vary depending on the size of your organization, ranging from a single person to a marketing staff of 40+ members. For a marketing team of four to six people, the annual cost of salaries plus benefits can range from $475,000 to $600,000 per year, depending on the makeup of your team and their location. Even if all these team members are talented, will this team truly provide you with the entire range of skills that your marketing program needs? It is doubtful.
Furthermore, it is crucial to invest in marketing strategists to create and drive a strategic marketing plan rather than one that is only transactional. Even with eight or 10 people on your team, it is nearly impossible to create a team that has the array of skills needed to execute against your strategy and that also includes at least one senior strategist who understands your industry.
Gain Control and Improve ROI
Like nearly all business needs, marketing requirements have ebbs and flows in demand. Think of an update to your brand, launching a new product/service offering, or educating the market and integrating after a merger or acquisition. These efforts require a lot of marketing support in a short time period. When these big projects are completed, however, your company reverts to times of normal or even lower demand for marketing resources.
Outsourcing your marketing provides you the control to utilize skilled marketing resources when you need it — undertaking significant projects in a condensed period — without assuming the costs of a full-time staff when you don’t. You obtain the resources you need with lower overhead and more flexibility, increasing your ROI when you outsource your marketing to the right partner.
Partner With Health Science Experts
No matter what your specific marketing goals are, you want to position your company for growth. But unless your marketing team is exceptionally large, it is highly unlikely you have the breadth and depth of skills you need to differentiate your company and engage your prospects and clients.
By partnering with a reputable, experienced agency — not just one with the required skills but one that has the market intelligence, creativity, and industry acumen to develop and guide your strategy — you will supplement your team with specialists who have the knowledge and experience to know what works. The right partner should be able to not only give you a fresh, creative perspective but also the strategy and execution to enable you to meet your goals and drive your success.