BY DANIEL BLACK

Companies can’t afford their marketing. There, we said it. Well, they can afford it, but they can’t afford to build their in-house teams with the complete breadth and depth they want or need.

Whether your marketing team is 1, 10, or 50 people, there’s always another area of specialization or expertise that would be nice to have, but can you really afford … a dedicated voice search engine optimization specialist?!

Ask anyone in charge of marketing and they’ll tell you they struggle with the same question: Which skills and resources do I need on our team (full-time) and which can I live without? I’ve chatted with great in-house marketers over the years about this and it’s a tough one. The reality is, creativity may be an unlimited resource, but marketing budgets are finite.

Reality sets in after you’ve tried to build an all-internal team and recognize you’re trying to:

• Hire for marketing skills and know-how, as well as knowledge of your company’s specific industry (not the easiest in the B2B landscape)

• Cover employee transitions, PTO, extended leaves, and other gaps on the team

• Balance the need for specialists and generalists to cover all functional marketing areas

• Pivot marketing program to align with ever-changing business needs and strategies

That’s not to say it can’t be done. It can, and I can name a few marketers who have done it deftly (I won’t name names, but they know who I’m talking about). Building an internal team of any shape or size is tricky; it’s a delicate balancing act and one that takes lots of experimentation and adjustments to keep it dialed in. (And it typically takes deep pockets.)

So, if you’re not going to build an all-star-all-internal team, what are you left to do? Well, here are some of the solution-shopping I’ve seen over the years (warning: these typically fail hard):

• Hire a team of interns – the business development team would never do that, but somehow people think it’s a good idea for marketing

• Hire the marketing unicorn who can write masterfully, design beautifully, think strategically, code flawlessly, oh, and manage budgets on par with a seasoned CFO

• Give challenging senior work to junior people. If you don’t know why this fails … yikes. And don’t blame the employee when it doesn’t work. It’s our job to put people in positions to succeed and support them along the way.

• Hire agencies they can’t afford. Both parties – client and agency – own some of the blame in this scenario. Client-agency fit is a big topic and deserves more than a passing bullet. I’ll come back to this in a future post.

• Farm out to an army of freelancers. While tempting, this path is fraught with dangers. What you save in hourly rates, you’ll pay for in so many other ways, including the time your team will spend corralling a designer, web developer, writer, SEO specialist, and the list goes on. And every time your business strategy pivots, you need to keep them all current. In theory, this approach should work. In practice, it rarely does.

To be clear, these are common paths, so if you’ve tried and failed, you’re not alone. If you’ve had success, kudos. In all sincerity, I would enjoy hearing your strategy and solution. Hey, maybe I’ll even do a Q&A with you!

Okay, so let’s say you’ve concluded you can’t afford the all-internal-all-star team. And you’ve tried the aforementioned, solution-shopping, and they failed. So, what’s next?

Warning: What follows may sound a bit salesy. If that’s not your cup of tea, stop reading.

Just last week, our team was chatting in the office, excitedly, about Rent the Runway (RTR) and Nuuly. If you’re not familiar, these are companies that let you gain access to nice clothing for a reasonable fee, without buying anything. With RTR, you can receive 5 items for $94 per month. If you increase to $149 per month, you can get 15 items per month across three shipments and five items at a time. With Nuuly, a RTR competitor, you can access six items per month for $98. Clearly, I did my research for this blog. These companies aren’t on my radar.

I don’t know which company is better—I’m just impressed I knew how to spell Nuuly—or why people choose one option versus the other. But I do know that RTR and Nuuly are just two of countless examples of the subscription economy, which describes the trend toward asset access instead of asset ownership. In other words, you can rent more than you can buy. The subscription economy is a big, and growing market. Estimates put the subscription economy at $120 billion in 2022, and forecasts project it to be a $900 billion market by 2026.

We rent, or subscribe (a form of renting) countless things (cars, phones, boats, houses, etc.) for a variety of reasons. We rent because it gives us access to something that we can’t afford to buy. Or, maybe you don’t want to own that thing but are only interested in accessing it for a period of time. In other cases, our rental gives us partial access to the asset, which may be fine.  

So, if this rental-based approach works for cars, dresses, phones, and just about everything else, why can’t it work for marketing too? The answer is, it does.

If you’re wondering—was that his big sales pitch?—yes, that was the whole shebang. In case you missed it, here it is again: Think about what skills, resources, and people you need full-time, in-house on your marketing team, and then complement or supplement with outside resources, ideally a one-stop-shop that can be your go-to-resource across all areas.

Wondering what to ask an agency before you hire them? My colleague Mel has a few ideas to consider.

Interested? Give us a shout. We’ll be glad to chat about renting whatever it is that you want to rent.