When to Hire and Outsource to Keep Your Marketing Team Lean

Many organizations have been forced to run leaner in recent years and to reduce staff. The negative effects of layoffs on employee morale and organizational culture are being felt by many, and they underscore the importance of ensuring that your teams are staffed in a sustainable way. But marketing can’t cease because staffing budgets have been cut and there will always be expertise gaps on even the most well-rounded teams.

While marketing leaders know that lean teams with outsourced expertise can provide a better return on investment, increasing overall headcount is an attractive option with the compelling advantages of increased capabilities, skill development and staff retention. After all, developing and maintaining an innovative marketing culture is harder when running a lean team. Before deciding how to best staff your needs, consider the capabilities and capacity of your existing team. 

Assessing Expertise & Capacity of Your Marketing Team

When deciding whether your current team has capacity, the first step should be to evaluate competing priorities. Reviewing the value of current initiatives before deciding to outsource or hire additional staff can lead to reallocating existing capacity and help avoid unnecessary costs.

When it comes to expertise, having the right skill set is not the same, especially when it comes to technically complex or creative marketing. Consider graphic design campaign work or a marketing automation platform migration. You may have content marketers or marketing ops staff, people with the right skill sets, but they may still lack the experience and specialized expertise to efficiently perform the work. 

Another important consideration is whether team members capable of doing the work are willing to do it (a nice way to consider your team here is the “get it, want it, capable of doing it” questions from Gino Wickman’s EOS Framework). Failing to take employee roles, responsibilities,  and development into account can lead to costly staff turnover.

When to Hire

Hiring should be reserved for performing and scaling core marketing activities that drive revenue. Hiring should be the first solution you think of when:

• Existing resources either lack capacity or expertise
• The hire produces or enables marketing that drives revenue (justifiable ROI)
• The need for the skill set translates to a role that can be easily hired for
• There is near and long-term (at least 24 month) need for the role
• There is a path to advancement within the company
• The fully burdened cost isn’t significantly more than a service provider (requires research)

This guidance results in agile marketing teams that are ideal for startups and mid-size companies, but does create resource gaps when it comes to capacity and specialized expertise. 

When to Outsource

Outsourcing with agencies or freelancers is a necessary strategy for running a lean team. You should seek outside experts anytime you need to deliver or scale marketing activities that require you to: 

• Temporarily fill gaps in expertise
• Supplement existing team capacity with fractional or variable resources
• Implement technically complex solutions, technologies or processes
• Pilot initiatives that aren’t core to your business
• Utilize skill sets that would require multiple hires or have no opportunity for advancement

The major benefits of outsourcing are that you can benefit from deeply specialized expertise that would be difficult to hire for and receive better results more quickly. Often services can be obtained on a fixed fee project basis that allows you to more easily control your marketing costs.