When you’re trying to build the best marketing department you can with your budget, you can’t simply pile more and more responsibilities and duties onto your existing team. They may be good, but nobody has unlimited bandwidth. Eventually, they’ll break.
Building a “SMART” external marketing team is the right way to grow your marketing without risking its success.
But, how do you build the right team? Follow this simple acronym and build a “SMART” external marketing team to complement your existing in-house team.
“S” – Specialized
As you expand your marketing team, your existing team likely has a great core of knowledge and a thorough understanding of your industry. They are the right team in place to help make decisions and help operate inside of your business. Once this is established, you need to add marketing specialists to help your team execute the campaigns with excellence. Adding specialized teams who understand the intricacies of specific campaign areas helps to bring experience and depth to specific components marketing in a way that no internal team could provide alone.
The result? Extraordinary success that can’t be attained by your existing team under their existing workload.
“M” – Measurable
One of the best things about building a “SMART” marketing team is that they are focused on measurable goals. Whether it’s ROI on marketing dollars, leads generated, or another marketing activity, the focus is on the measurement of the activities and the results therein. Your existing internal teams are faced with a bevy of other challenges that don’t always allow them to be as focused on the measurable results. So, building a “SMART” team to help them creates a win-win for your marketing team, allowing them to manage the high-level day-to-day and lead the experts who are creating the campaigns instead of getting bogged down in metrics. The combination helps to reel-in the results.
“A” – Accountable
Along with measurability comes accountability. A team that is held accountable to measurable goals rather than made to focus only on tactics allows for more flexibility in the overall approach. Accountability works for management, because it allows you to dictate your relationship and dollars as success is reached, and it works for the team because it allows them to be creative in reaching the goals instead of being beholden to preset notions on what management wants.
“R” – Retained
Having a “SMART” marketing team means that they are really part of the team – they are “retained” for your use. Retaining a marketing team is more than a contractor relationship, because you are entering into a relationship based on the success and goals needed for your company – not just a set of deliverables. You’re willing to work with them as they reach towards your goals, and you’re giving them the security of knowing that you believe in them to help you, and that you’re willing to make a commitment to their plan.
“T” – Timely
Last but not least, a “SMART” team builds additional bandwidth to get things done faster. Once you start to grow, your internal team won’t be able to handle everything and you might not want to expand your payroll to accommodate additional bandwidth. A “SMART” external team can add flexible bandwidth to your team as needed, and can prevent you from overloading your team or hiring prematurely. Additionally, external teams usually have deeper rosters and can turn things around really quickly on short notice.
Make Your Team “SMART”
“SMART” external marketing teams are a great way to grow your marketing plans without blowing your budget. If you are interested in growing your team for maximum success, let’s have a call to discuss. Or, download our ebook, How to Work with an Agency, to learn how to best manage your team.
