Building a lean mean marketing team is a challenge - particularly as the list of essential marketing skills continues to expand.  What skills do you have, what could you employ and where would it be more cost effective to outsource? That's the question.

First, take a look at your B2B marketing strategy, and drill down through to the tactics to derive a list of skills with their respective demands in terms of time.  Your skill list might look something like this:

• Marketing strategy and planning
• Project management
• Content development - for web, email, blog, print, white papers, brochures, ebooks etc
• Website design and creation
• Lead Generation
• Lead management campaign planning and execution
• Marketing automation
• CRM / prospect database management
• Social media use and monitoring
• Webinar production and management
• Event planning, marketing and execution
• ROI Analysis and management reporting
• ...and more!

Now map your current skills set against the requirements to identify any clear gaps. Look at those gaps - is there enough volume of work to justify an extra team member? 

Next, go back and look at the anticipated volume of work for those tasks where you do have skills in house. If each employee has approximately 200-220 days per year, do you have enough resource or too little or even too much? How could people be redeployed / trained to fill some of the gaps?

Are there some tasks where, even though you have adequately skilled resources in house, it makes better sense to package them up and outsource them rather than stretch people too thinly? For example could your in house website resource keep the current site up to date whilst you outsource a fresh design to another company? Or how about outsourcing a particular project or event?

And what about your wish list?  That list of things that you know would be really great to do, are within your capability and would be a big benefit to your business.....if only you could focus on them?  What if you outsourced them?  Or, would it be more attractive to outsource other more mundane things in order to give you the time that you need?

On the other hand, where you don't have skill gaps, do you just need some input from outside, a fresh pair of eyes, an individual project that could zap the focus on the normal activities of the department?

As well as making your in house team more productive, what other benefits could you derive from outsourcing?

PLUGGING SKILLS GAPS

PROVIDING FLEXIBILITY

Outsourced resources can be turned on and off as you need them giving you the ability flex your team as and when the need arises.

ACHIEVE COST SAVINGS

Want to know more? As a HubSpot Partner, Intellegentia can help you define your inbound marketing strategy and run with it using this inbound marketing software - delivering leads and helping you achieve your sales-related business goals. Click below to learn more...