5 Ways Agencies Complement Your In-House Creative and Marketing Team
You just got out of a Q4 meeting with the CEO who handed you a bucket list of projects to tackle next year. You slowly walk back to your office thinking, I love this team, but now the boss wants all of this on top of everything we’re already doing? Does he understand anything about creatives? Does he think just because we have “marketing people” on staff, that they are experts in everything related to marketing and advertising?
You’ve been doing this a long time, and there is no way to get through the whole list, and you know it. When you look at his wish list, you know you can finish a handful of items with the team you have, but the rest is not in your wheelhouse.
You’ll need to petition your CEO for an updated budget to hire the right people. But when you start thinking of all the experts these projects require, you know he’s not granting you that kind of budget. So, what do you do if you can’t hire the team of in-house creative and marketing experts you need?
You complement your existing creative services and marketing team by pulling in an outside integrated marketing and advertising agency to fill in the holes. It’s not as expensive or as fussy as hiring another dozen people, and your project timeline doesn’t allow for that anyway.
When you go back to the boss asking for a revised budget, you’ll need some backup. Here you go:
5 Ways Agencies Can Complement Your In-House Creative Services & Marketing Team
1. Develop a Long-Term Strategy
You’ve managed a creative services and marketing team for years, but at the end of the day, you’re a creative, not a strategist. Developing marketing and advertising strategies is someone’s full-time job. There are strategy experts out there. When you hire an agency to provide a strategy, you’re not just getting a per-campaign strategy. A good integrated marketing and advertising agency will provide you with a long-term strategy umbrella under which all your hopes, dreams, and projects will come alive. You’ll no longer be fielding comments like: I’m not really feeling this branding concept anymore. My boyfriend’s in San Diego, let’s get a booth at this conference. Shouldn’t we be spending less on Google Ads and more with Influencers?
An agency’s strategy team are full of experts with cross-disciplined experience centered around creating, implementing, testing, and refining cutting-edge campaigns. They know what works and what doesn’t. You won’t have to reinvent the strategy wheel with your in-house team for each and every campaign you run.
2. Execute Quick-Turnaround Projects
If there is one thing you’d like to change, it would be to expedite your company’s approval process, right? The time it takes from idea to implementation is painful.
The glorious thing about bringing in an agency to help is that you don’t have to trudge through a pyramid of approvals each time you want to get a project in motion. You get one approval for the strategy and budget, then you’re done.
3. Deliver Niche Experts
High-impact, quick turnaround projects are only possible if you have a team of deeply-specialized experts. Drop a bunch of experts into your team, and your projects are executed at a whole new level. Some things you can have your agency of record execute for you are:
- Develop custom apps
- Integrate disparate systems
- Design data tracking rules to analyze operations, gather intelligence, and enable fact-based recommendations
- Design creative video animations and video editing
- Provide audio-visual resources and production services
- Create customized publications, case studies, white papers, and blogs
When you reduce the internal approval bureaucracy and layer a team of super-specialized experts onto your campaigns, you can pump out projects with record speed.
4. Hedge Against Staffing Turnover
The typical in-house marketing staff experiences turnover at a rate of 17%. Hiring an outside marketing and advertising agency to supplement your team helps you hedge against staffing turnover. We all know onboarding is time consuming. If you need a project done now, but two of your people just quit, you no longer have to scramble to hire whoever you can get right now. To stay on track with your deadlines, all you have to do is hand the files to your agency.
What if you were hit by a bus? What would the CEO do then? Can the team run themselves? Can they pull all the pieces together? Do they know enough about the overall strategy to make smart choices going forward? Probably not. If you were no longer with the company, but you had an outside agency that knew your business through and through, the company would be okay.
Another benefit of having a truly integrated marketing and advertising agency on your side is there’s no longer a need to staff up for a one-off, large-scope campaign. While your new marketing budget may permit room for the campaign expense, you only have the money for one year—it doesn’t make sense to start buying desks and computers. Your agency enables you to keep things simple. They will provide services for an agreed-upon rate within the desired timeframe.
5. Reduce Time and Resources Used on Research and Analytics Reporting
No one on your team gets giddy about clicking ten screens deep into Google Analytics to get the stats on your geolocation segmentation performance, your internal promotions tracking, or wants to put together a weekly report on goal conversions, impressions, and click-through rates. A proper agency should have a staff of research and analytics reporting geeks who do this all day, every day. They can pull your stats while they have you on the phone and can help your team by providing you with data-based recommendations for your CEO.
Having a team of data and business intelligence experts on your side helps you synthesize all that overwhelming, elemental, and disparate information into actionable insights to improve business performance and increase market growth.
Hire a One-Stop-Shop
So, if you’re in a tight spot and you’re thinking you may need to supplement your creative services and marketing team, consider complementing your team with an integrated marketing and advertising agency. The last thing you want to bother with is hiring and managing multiple vendors. To find the right team of experts, keep things simple for yourself and make sure the agency you choose is a one-stop-shop that provides a broad range of expertise.
