Pop quiz: if you received a freeze on headcount today could your current team cope with your 2022 digital marketing needs? Most brand owners we speak with say no. If you did too, we can help.
It’s no surprise to anyone that marketing is continuing to evolve at an exciting -but alarming – rate. As such, brand owners like myself are managing teams with far more diverse skillsets than when many of us first started. Everything has increased in complexity.
Where we once had teams of strategic and qualitative marketers who could wear many hats to handle our traditional marketing needs. Now, we can’t survive without essential team members like data scientists, platform automation, programmatic, personalization, tagging and coding specialists, and quality assurance experts – just to execute, optimize and scale a typical campaign.
And as consumer digital demands increase, and the advertising talent crisis continues, many marketing teams are struggling to evolve at the same pace.
Digital marketing didn’t just grow in the past year -it exploded.
2020 forced businesses to go fully remote and digital became our primary access point for work, e-commerce, news, entertainment and social connection. It also created a huge boost for online marketers, a $105 billion boost to be exact. That’s a 32% increase in the opportunity for brands to connect with consumers digitally.
However, this digital explosion increased the demands placed on in-house marketing teams and agencies. And magnified the skill gaps across more traditionally composed team structures.
Why does this matter? Digital is far more complex than traditional advertising.
Before, there were a few well defined options: OOH, radio, tv, print, direct. We planned quarterly. Creative was expensive but had a long shelf-life. Campaigns regularly ran for 6 months. Reporting primarily came from Nielsen. And optimization was paid forward to the next campaign -or often the campaign after that.
Fast forward to today, although the science behind how advertising can influence consumers is still valid, consumers today are bombarded with more stimulation and messaging than ever before so we’re all competing to reach and retain their attention.
With a labyrinth of channel and creative options, and the rapid speed of technological evolution, the volume of always-on activities for our marketing teams has exploded. The work itself has become extremely detail oriented. And the challenge is that traditional team compositions weren’t built for these complexities.
Digital advertising is becoming an industry of specialists
Back in the day we had channel specialists that owned areas like traditional branding, event, direct strategies – today’s team is so complex it needs technology and creative specialists for each platform – who have their finger on the pulse of platform consumer trends and behaviors, and advertising best practices.
Within this, it necessitates the need for both big thinking qualitative and detail- oriented quantitative experts who can work to their strengths for the greater good of the brand.
And this is where we’re helping brands handle these exploding digital demands.
At WorkReduce, our brand partners deploy our talent either to own an entire functional area like ad operations or programmatic media planning and buying, or to supplement their existing team by covering specific functional tasks like QA, trafficking, reporting, creative resizing, direct media buying.
In most cases, our enterprise brand partners deploy our WorkReduce Service Desk for these functions in order to scale flexible, on-demand specialist support. But we also provide dedicated staff augmentation support at all levels, as we do across our agency partners.
Does your digital marketing team need help today?
Reach out to our team to chat about your specific needs and to understand how we can help.
By Sarah Calkin-Ward, Head of Marketing, WorkReduce
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