Of all the challenges facing the modern marketer, it’s managing the increasingly fragmented array of channels, platforms and touchpoints - the zig-zag customer journey - that’s causing the most chaos. But it’s not just creating chaos. It’s created a chasm too.
For many years, small to mid-sized companies have hired generalist marketers who know a little about a lot of different marketing disciplines - be it email, direct mail, events or social media. And generally speaking, this has done the job.
But as a result of technology advances, marketing has become increasingly more sophisticated in all areas. Each marketing discipline has evolved significantly and new ones have emerged too. This has made every area more resource-hungry and now each requires very specific skill-sets.
The company website is a great example
A few years ago, the company website was just an online brochure requiring little maintenance. After hiring a web designer to help with the biannual website revamp, you could simply set and forget – not needing to touch it. Fast-forward to today and the company website is a far more essential component in your business development process.
Not only is it the main platform for potential customers to evaluate your company, but it should also be a lead generation and conversion machine. Your website is now your most powerful marketing tool. Or at least it should be. Yet the skills and level of resources needed to manage this properly have advanced significantly.
Now you need to understand buyer journeys, user experience (UX) conversion optimisation, mobile responsiveness, smart content, inbound marketing, automation and so on. The point is that as technology proliferates and competition intensifies, a basic grounding in each marketing discipline is no longer enough to be truly effective. Only best-practice in each specific area will produce real results - and this has led to the rise of specialisation.
Specialisation is big in big businesses
Large organisations have leveraged their resources to build internal teams packed full of different specialist marketers - in turn, managed by experienced generalists able to hold their own at board level. To go with specialist people, these teams are equipped with specialist tools. This is why large companies invest so heavily in marketing technology, giving rise to the multi-million pound ‘Martech' industry we know today.
While this is all well and good for organisations with deep pockets, the key question is, ‘how can smaller businesses compete on a budget?’
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Let’s look at your options
In a mid-size business (turning over £15m-£20m), an in-house marketing team would require, at the very least, a senior leader and a couple of marketing executives. These combined salaries and associated overhead costs would be in the region of £120K to £150K - and that’s before the cost of training and martech even comes into play. Then there’s your marketing spend on top.
With just shy of the average UK house price invested in your marketing team before discussing the marketing budget, it’s understandable why some businesses look at cheaper options.
One or two lower-paid, less experienced marketers may be the answer - but naturally, this can have a detrimental impact on the department’s performance. More often than not, as the old adage states, ‘you get what you pay for’.
Another option is to contract a marketing agency with an eye-watering price tag - only to realise later that agencies find it just as challenging to be genuine experts in everything. It's also a short-term campaign or project-based engagement, so all that time you spend educating them about your business is lost when they disappear on to their next big project.
You could instead turn to the freelance market. More affordable - but a real minefield. A tiresome tale of trial and error until you find the right talent, and the likelihood of losing that talent when a bigger project comes along.
The key to marketing effectiveness
As stressed earlier, it’s not the shiny new marketing tactic or tool that you’re missing. The key to marketing effectiveness is the people you have running your function and how you have set-up your marketing operations.
The reality is that marketing is different from most professions. Unlike finance for example, marketing qualifications and training are no guarantee of performance. It really is down to an individual marketer's experience, expertise and attitude - and sadly, its an industry lacking in genuine talent.
It’s clear that a wide range of specialist skills are required to do justice to today’s marketing efforts. Equally, it’s clear that the costs of building an in-house team can be prohibitive - and that agencies aren’t always the best fit.
If you want to explore a different way to build a specialised function, check out our guide 'B2B Marketing Machine'.
