The real cost of marketing support
Are you about to hire a marketing manager? A web designer? An SEO specialist? Or a social media manager? Then you should continue reading …
Marketing is an essential part of any business of any scale’s operations. Not only can it create visibility for your brand, but it also allows you to gain new clients or customers and assist you in reaching the right audiences at the right time.
Think for a moment if you only relied on word-of-mouth advertising. Would you still be able to tap into the consumer market in which you wanted to excel in? The answer to this is likely no – especially when it comes to new markets and segments.
According to Statista, about $1.7 billion was spent on advertising in the retail industry in 2019 in Australia. Also, a CMO Survey notes that businesses spent around 13.8% of their overall company revenue in 2022 on marketing.
However, the question that many business owners might be asking is whether they should only focus on hiring marketing team members according to their specific marketing needs, or look to individual or freelance providers.
The fact is, marketing support can come at a hefty price tag when not approached right.
Take, for example, some fee structures for hiring individual team members. A chief marketing officer could fetch a hefty salary of $170K, while a web developer’s median salary could reach up to $55k. And this is not even touching on graphic design, social media management, copywriting or software, to mention but a few.
Now, deliberate how much you will need to budget to fill and pay all of your marketing position needs, compared with if you considered a marketing support retainer for a skilled agency. An in-house team could easily set you back around $829K in salaries per year!
Why you should consider hiring an external marketing support team
Unlike hiring a full list of team members internally, for which you would need to allocate wages, benefits and other payroll requirements, marketing support teams can be a more economical solution that comes with several benefits.
These include:
- Being able to hire a team that could be in proximity of your business or even remote, if where they are based will not be an issue.
- Having access to several capabilities such as design, strategy, social content and more.
- Increased efficiency and output.
- Reduced software costs.
- Saving on recruitment fees.
- No need to train staff as marketing teams will already have the skills needed.
- Not needing to spend excessive amounts on support time and costs for doing troubleshooting.
Imagine if you, for instance, need a new website design as well as social media account setup and management for your website. This already would have required a graphic designer, a web developer, a hosting partner, social media manager and a content creator if you were hiring in-house.
Now, with a marketing support team, you already have access to all of these functions. You do not need several team members, as you already have one point of contact for rolling out these different tasks.
Also, when you work with one marketing support team, you can be assured of a more cohesive marketing approach where all of your messaging is aligned – an especially important point when you need to ensure that both your online and offline communications are streamlined.
From a cost perspective, working on marketing retainers can effortlessly help you achieve your goals. Because you are able to negotiate fees and hours spent on your projects, you can save thousands of dollars that you would have otherwise spent when you handled all marketing processes and hiring internally.
Therefore, if you want to ensure the success of marketing overall, including important launches and frequent visibility for your brand, external marketing support can elevate every opportunity for your business.
Ultimately, when you work with a marketing agency, you will get a dedicated account manager that ensures that tasks get done for you. Because their sole focus is your marketing operations, unlike an internal team that might be required to handle other business tasks as well, they have a razor-sharp focus on your marketing needs.
It is worth the investment – not only in terms of saving money, but also giving you more time to work on essential parts of your business.
Ready to partner with Shuttle?
At Shuttle, our skilled marketing teams are experts in various niches and industries. If you are looking for a team that will take your marketing strategies to the next level, we are ready to collaborate. Contact us today, and let’s create rock-solid strategies that will have the results that you are looking for!
