How to Build your Marketing Team When Budget & Headcount are Capped

Curated By MTI Staff on October 26, 2015

How a Headcount Freeze can Stifle Company Growth

Have you ever heard a marketer talk about how ‘Marketing is evolving at such a rapid pace’? Well it’s true, but it’s now officially become cliché!

As marketers we need to come up with new ways to keep up with these changes, but recognize that we can’t ‘boil the ocean’.

So how do you take on new marketing initiatives when your department has a massive skill gap(s) in one of marketing’s shiny new channels such as:

Marketing Automation
Demand Generation
Search & Social
Content Marketing
Analytics & Optimization

Your Reality:

You have a capped Head Count for your department – Hiring is a no go!
Your Marketing Budget is Limited – So you can’t farm it to the agency!

Here’s an example of how we ‘rented’ out a digital expert to solve this very dilemma:

Our client is a Global Food manufacturer and needed to build the Marketing team’s online marketing expertise.

As a global Consumer Goods player primarily known for its hearty canned goods, the Company wanted to enhance the online experience for their customers and improve how the customers could interact with the brand.

The goal was to show them how to use their products to make meal planning easier.

The plan was to launch a new dedicated cooking website as well as a recipe app for mobile devices with the ultimate goal of growing sales in the portfolio.

Our client was already recognized as a leading CPG player in the digital space, having allocated 50% of the ‘Cooking’ portfolio budget for digital. This is why the online expertise was critical for success.

The Headcount Problem:

With strict head count rules in place, the company could not bring on a full time head to take on the role. With a recession in full effect, this could not simply be tasked to the Ad agency and in addition, internal digital capabilities were limited.

Our Solution: The Missing Ingredient

We suggested hiring an Interim Online Brand Manager for the project. In just under two weeks MTI was able to identify an individual who had the traditional brand management expertise that was needed to navigate a Tier 1 Consumer Goods company as well as having experience working on several major digital initiatives.

As an added benefit, the incumbent had experience working within the category and our secret sauce – the associate was also a certified gourmet chef.

Result: More Market Share & Industry Award Recognition

The result was a highly successful launch of the program. In addition to achieving revenue objectives as well as several online KPI’s, our client garnered numerous awards for the initiatives.

Think you could use one of our Experts?

We would love to chat with you to talk about how temporary marketing professionals can solve your marketing team and departments skill gap challenges.