When Your Marketing Workload Outgrows Your Team

Somewhere in your inbox is an email asking for a "quick" update to the company website. Sales needs a new service added before an upcoming meeting, operations has to confirm the technical details, and the only decent photograph of the equipment is on someone's personal phone.

The update itself might take ten minutes. Finding everything needed to make the update could take until Thursday.

If you're responsible for marketing at an established company, you've probably gotten pretty good at handling requests like this. You're the person leadership trusts to keep everything moving, which means your responsibilities range from major marketing decisions to figuring out why the company logo looks terrible on someone's PowerPoint presentation.

As the company grows, more departments need marketing support. Projects accumulate, deadlines overlap, and the work that requires your attention gets pushed aside while you coordinate everything else.

An outsourced marketing team can help with production and project coordination, provided you know which responsibilities to hand off and how the relationship should work.

How much of your week is spent chasing people?

Think about your last two weeks. How much time did you spend developing marketing initiatives compared with tracking down approvals, requesting information and checking on projects?

You might spend Monday coordinating a video shoot, Tuesday collecting website content, and Wednesday trying to get someone to approve social media posts from the previous week. By Thursday, leadership wants to know why the website project hasn't moved forward.

Well, you've been busy trying to get them to approve it.

There's a useful exercise you can do before deciding whether to hire additional marketing support.

Review your recent projects and write down:

• What required your judgment? Campaign direction, messaging, budgets and decisions that affect the company's reputation.
• What required your participation? Meetings with leadership, department coordination and approvals.
• What required someone to do the work? Website updates, graphic design, video editing, scheduling and content production.
• What kept getting delayed? Missing information, unavailable employees, unclear responsibilities or a lack of production capacity.

The last two categories deserve attention. They can reveal opportunities to hand off recurring work or improve the process without changing how your department makes decisions.

Here's another question worth considering: If you took a week off, which marketing projects would continue moving without anyone needing to contact you?

Your answer can tell you quite a bit about how dependent the department has become on your availability.

What should an outside marketing team handle?

Suppose your sales director needs a new capabilities page for an upcoming business development meeting.

You understand the audience and know which services should be featured. Someone in operations has the technical information, but getting that person to write website copy would be an ambitious request.

A marketing partner can take the approved direction and coordinate the remaining work.

For a project like this, responsibilities could look something like:

• Internal marketing leader: Sets the direction, identifies the appropriate subject matter expert and approves the final content.
• Agency project manager: Coordinates the schedule, contacts the appropriate employees and follows up on missing information.
• Writer and designer: Prepare the content and page layout using approved information.
• Web team: Builds the page, checks its functionality and prepares it for publication.

The same arrangement can work for recruiting videos, monthly content production and other recurring assignments.

An agency may produce excellent work, but there's a problem if every project stalls while waiting for you to gather the information.

If your weekly agency report consistently says "Waiting on Client," you might want to look into who is managing whom.

Better project handoffs start with clear responsibilities

Delegating work becomes frustrating when everybody has a different understanding of who's responsible for the next step.

You may assume the agency is coordinating with operations, while the agency is waiting for you to send the information. Two weeks later, everybody has been very patient and the project hasn't moved.

A simple project brief can prevent much of that confusion.

Before work begins, establish the intended outcome, deadline, source of information, final approver and person responsible for managing production.

For example, a recruiting video might begin with HR identifying the positions that need attention. Your agency could then coordinate interviews, schedule filming, edit the footage and prepare the finished material for review.

The team should also flag missing information early enough to resolve it before the deadline.

A weekly meeting may help everyone stay aligned, but it should focus on decisions, problems and upcoming priorities. Nobody needs another 45-minute meeting devoted to reading a project management board out loud.

Which responsibilities should stay with you?

Your relationships inside the company are one of the reasons leadership trusts you with marketing.

You understand how decisions are made, which departments need support and where marketing fits into the company's larger goals. That knowledge becomes particularly important when several projects are competing for attention.

You should remain involved in decisions where your experience and company knowledge make a meaningful difference.

For instance, leadership may want to emphasize a new service line while sales is asking for additional attention on existing capabilities. That decision deserves a conversation about priorities, available resources and expected results.

Once the direction is approved, however, routine production can move forward through an established process.

Consider asking yourself:

Am I reviewing this project because my judgment is needed, or because nobody else has been assigned responsibility for finishing it?

There's a meaningful difference between approving a marketing decision and spending an hour searching for the latest version of a file.

Test the relationship before expanding it

A manageable trial can help determine whether an outside agency is a good fit for your organization.

Monthly content production is one option. Your internal team identifies the upcoming priorities, while the agency coordinates photography or video, prepares content and manages the approval process.

Ongoing website support is another possibility, especially when departments frequently request new pages or updates.

Before beginning, agree on how work will be requested and what the agency will own. Then evaluate the arrangement after a reasonable production cycle.

A few useful measurements include:

• How many planned assignments were completed on schedule?
• How much of your time went toward project coordination?
• Which delays could the agency have prevented or managed?
• Did the finished work meet your standards without extensive rewriting?

The agency should become more familiar with your business as the relationship develops. That familiarity can reduce the amount of direction you need to provide on recurring assignments.

Of course, if you're spending every weekend rewriting content that was supposed to save you time, the relationship needs some work.

When does an outsourced marketing team make sense?

An outside marketing team can be a good fit for an established business that needs consistent support across several specialties.

An industrial company, for example, may need website maintenance throughout the year, video production during major projects and regular content to support sales and recruiting. Those responsibilities require different skills, and the workload may fluctuate depending on what's happening in the business.

An internal hire may make more sense when the company needs someone physically present every day or responsible for ongoing internal communications. A specialized freelancer can also be a good option for a narrow assignment.

The decision comes down to the type of work, how frequently it occurs and how much coordination your internal team can manage.

Start with the projects that never seem to get finished

Look at the assignments that have been sitting on your list for weeks. Find out why they haven't moved forward.

Some may be waiting on leadership decisions. Others need technical information, creative production or somebody with enough time to manage the process.

Once you've identified the recurring problems, you can make a more informed decision about additional support.

At Make Waves Marketing, we work with established businesses that need help executing their marketing plans. Our team handles website development, SEO, social media and video production, allowing internal marketing leaders to focus on their priorities while we manage agreed-upon production work.

If your marketing workload has outgrown your team, contact Make Waves Marketing. We can review what's currently on your plate and discuss which responsibilities our team could take over.