How Marketing Contractors Increase your ROI
Downsizing, layoffs, unemployment, and lower-than-expected earnings are
becoming repetitive terms on the six o’clock news. But all this
doom and gloom should just remind you that your company better get sales
up—and fast! And since marketing drives sales, the marketing department
is where businesses should focus their efforts and resources.
Unfortunately, marketing departments are often one of the first to feel
the impact of lean times, yet they are still expected to perform and yield
the same or even better results. If you don’t have strong and successful
marketing initiatives, your competition will. The last thing you need
is your customers going to a competitor and your sales dropping off. With
so many marketing departments now operating with a skeleton staff and
an equally bare bones budget, there’s a scramble to find a workable
solution.
When your marketing department has a staff of ten doing the work of fifteen,
deadlines get pushed back, new campaign ideas get dropped, and tensions
rise when there aren’t enough hands and minds to do the work. Budgets
can’t be stretched to add on new employees, yet you still need to
get top-quality work done—your CEO isn’t going to accept the
excuse that you didn’t have enough money or enough help. You are
still expected to perform like you always have-despite your challenges.
So how can you continue to deliver timely, effective marketing campaigns
while controlling costs?
Traditionally, to get more work done, companies picked one of two solutions.
The first, hiring more staff, is simply not an option for many companies
right now—especially if they’ve had to lay off marketing employees
recently. The second option is hiring an ad agency to create and execute
campaigns. This is often an effective, though very expensive, proposition.
While top ad agencies strengths are in their strategic vision and creative
skills, they are not always necessary (or cost effective) to use in the
execution phase. A third option is to use experienced marketers on a contract
basis for any or every phase of a program launch. Your costs are controlled
and so is your overhead. The final product will look the same whether
you have XYZ Advertising Agency doing all the work or a combination of
your core staff and experienced marketers on a contract basis launching
your marketing campaign. You’ll get a better ROI on your efforts.
Hiring marketing contractors is a flexible, cost-effective and creative
solution. You don’t even have to necessarily have desk space available
for them--you can decide whether you want contractors in-house or working
from a remote location. Contracted marketing specialists can help with:
online marketing, analytics, interactive marketing, project management,
direct marketing, events, graphic design, market research, or just about
anything else you need. Bringing on contracted marketing professionals
will help you ramp up your organization into a full complement of marketing
professionals for whatever length of time you need while keeping your
expenses in check.
Putting contracted staffers to work for you reduces management, human
resources, and employment cost issues. You outsource that headache to
the staffing company! By keeping your core marketing staff in place, you
can bring in a complement of other marketing professionals to help you
when your staff gets overloaded or new projects come in—without
the overhead and commitment of another full-time employee. Even if a new
project gets dropped on your lap unexpectedly, a good marketing staffing
company can find qualified professionals on short notice.
In today’s global marketplace and troubled economy, companies have
to find creative solutions to getting the same (or better) marketing results
with a smaller budget and fewer staff. The bottom line is that no matter
what the economic challenges, you can’t skimp on the talent of your
staff or the effectiveness of your campaigns. And when you simply can’t
justify adding another employee to your payroll or shell out a small fortune
to an ad agency to outsource the work, contracted marketing professionals
will deliver an impressive ROI.
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Bob Van Rossum is the President of MarketPro Inc (www.marketproinc.com), he has more than a decade of experience running the United States’ leading marketing recruiter for experienced marketing, advertising, interactive, e-commerce and creative professionals to fill contract, direct-hire, and contract-to-hire positions. For more information, email bob(at)marketproinc(dot)com
