You’ve Got a Marketing Strategy. But Who’s Actually Doing the Work?
Putting together a marketing strategy is one thing. Finding the time, people and skills to actually deliver it is quite another.
It’s a challenge we see regularly with growing businesses. The strategy has been agreed, the priorities are clear and everyone is enthusiastic about what’s planned. But a few weeks later, the marketing manager is juggling several campaigns, the website updates are still waiting to be done and the CRM needs attention. Meanwhile, the next campaign is already due to launch.
For many businesses, the problem isn’t a lack of ideas or direction. It’s simply that there aren’t enough hours in the day, or enough people with the right skills, to do everything properly.
Hiring additional employees might seem like the obvious answer, but recruitment takes time and comes with ongoing costs and commitments. It’s also difficult to justify employing a full-time specialist when you might only need their particular skills for a few days each month.
Fortunately, there are other ways to get the marketing support your business needs.
When a good marketing strategy gets stuck
Marketing implementation is the process of putting your marketing strategy into action. It covers all the practical work needed to turn business objectives into campaigns, content, customer engagement and measurable results.
Take something as straightforward as launching a lead generation campaign. Before it can go live, someone needs to:
- Develop the campaign messaging and create the content.
- Build the landing pages and configure the enquiry forms.
- Set up email campaigns and automated follow-ups.
- Connect everything to the CRM so leads are captured and tracked.
- Monitor performance and make improvements along the way.
It’s quite a bit of work, and when you’re relying on a small marketing team that’s already stretched, it’s easy for things to fall behind. A campaign might have a great concept, but if the forms aren’t working properly, follow-up emails aren’t triggered or nobody has time to monitor enquiries, you’re potentially losing business before you’ve even had a conversation with a prospect.
Marketing implementation is about making sure those activities happen, work together and are delivered consistently. Publishing a few social media posts or launching the occasional campaign isn’t the same as delivering a coordinated marketing plan over time.
For that, you need people who can manage the day-to-day work while keeping the wider business objectives in mind.
You don’t always need to hire more people
When marketing starts falling behind, many business owners assume they need to recruit another employee. Sometimes that’s absolutely the right decision, particularly when there’s enough ongoing work to justify a permanent position.
But marketing requirements aren’t always that straightforward.
You might need someone with strong content writing skills for a few weeks while you’re updating your website, a CRM specialist to improve your marketing automation, or additional digital marketing support when you’re launching a new service.
Next month, your priorities could be completely different.
Finding one person with all those skills is difficult, and employing several specialists full-time isn’t always financially practical.
This is where outsourced marketing support can be particularly valuable. Rather than committing to permanent appointments, businesses can access experienced marketing professionals with the specific skills they need, for the time they need them.
It’s also useful for businesses that already have a marketing team but need additional capacity. Your marketing manager might be excellent at coordinating campaigns and managing the brand, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they should be expected to build complex automation workflows or manage every technical aspect of your website.
Bringing in specialist support allows your existing people to concentrate on their strengths while ensuring the more technical or time-consuming activities are still completed properly.
Getting the right marketing skills into your business
One of the challenges with modern marketing is just how many different skills are involved. Digital marketing alone covers an enormous amount of ground, and the tools and platforms businesses use are constantly evolving.
Depending on your marketing strategy and business priorities, you might need support with:
- Digital marketing and website management: Keeping your website updated, improving visibility and making sure your digital channels perform effectively.
- Content and social media: Creating relevant content, managing social platforms and keeping your business visible to the right audiences.
- Campaign implementation: Planning and delivering email campaigns, paid advertising, lead generation and promotional activity.
- CRM and marketing automation: Improving customer data, setting up workflows and making sure leads are followed up properly.
- Reporting and analytics: Understanding campaign performance, identifying opportunities and measuring what’s contributing to business growth.
Some of these activities require specialist technical knowledge, while others need strong creative, organisational or analytical skills. Having access to the right expertise means your business doesn’t have to rely on one person to do everything.
For example, a business might have a perfectly good website but struggle to generate enquiries because its content isn’t attracting the right visitors. Another might be generating plenty of leads but losing opportunities because its CRM isn’t properly configured or its follow-up process is inconsistent.
The problems are different, and so are the skills needed to solve them.
Rather than trying to fit every marketing requirement into one person’s job description, it makes more sense to identify what needs doing and bring in the appropriate expertise.
Having access to different specialists also makes it easier to adapt when priorities change, particularly during periods of growth when businesses are introducing new products, expanding into new markets or taking on more marketing activity.
How The Marketing Centre’s Activation Team helps
At The Marketing Centre South Africa, we’ve developed our Activation Team to help businesses overcome these challenges.
Our Activation Team brings together experienced marketing specialists across different disciplines, providing the hands-on support businesses need to implement their marketing strategies properly and efficiently.
The team can assist with digital marketing, content creation, social media, campaigns, marketing systems, CRM management, automation and other practical activities involved in delivering a marketing plan.
What makes the approach different is how that support fits into the wider marketing function.
Rather than working independently of the business’s marketing direction, the Activation Team works under the leadership of a Fractional Marketing Director. This means the specialists implementing the work have clear priorities and understand how their activities contribute to the overall strategy.
The Marketing Director provides the strategic oversight, while the Activation Team supplies the practical skills and additional capacity to help deliver the work.
For businesses, this means less time spent trying to coordinate different marketing suppliers and more confidence that the work being done supports the agreed objectives.
How does it work in practice?
Let’s say your business is preparing to launch a new service.
Your marketing strategy has identified the target audience, the positioning and the channels you want to use. But before the campaign can go live, there’s still a considerable amount of work to do.
Your website needs updating, campaign messaging must be written, social media content needs preparing and an email campaign has to be built. You might also need help with paid advertising and making sure all enquiries are correctly captured in your CRM.
Instead of recruiting additional employees or sourcing several individual freelancers, you can draw on the relevant skills within the Activation Team.
The work is planned and coordinated around your marketing priorities, with your Fractional Marketing Director maintaining oversight of progress and performance.
Once the campaign has launched, the skills required may change. You might need less content creation and more reporting, campaign optimisation or CRM support.
The flexibility to adjust the support as your needs evolve is an important part of the approach.
More than extra capacity
Although having additional people available is useful, there’s a difference between simply getting someone to complete a task and working with someone who understands how that task contributes to the broader marketing picture.
An experienced marketing specialist can often identify ways to improve an existing process, make better use of a platform or avoid common mistakes that cost businesses time and money.
For example, someone working on your email marketing might notice that your database segmentation could be improved, while a CRM specialist might identify gaps in how enquiries are being allocated to your sales team.
These are the kinds of practical improvements that can make marketing activity more effective over time.
There are also benefits for your existing employees. Rather than constantly trying to learn new platforms or deal with technical challenges outside their area of expertise, they can work alongside people who have the necessary experience.
The Activation Team isn’t necessarily there to replace your existing marketing team. Its role is to provide the experience, specialist skills and additional capacity your business needs, whether you already have a marketing department or are managing marketing yourself.
That support can take several forms:
- Supporting Marketing Directors: Providing experienced, hands-on specialists to help deliver campaigns, manage marketing systems and take on work that requires expertise beyond the existing team’s capabilities.
- Mentoring and developing employees: Working alongside junior or newly appointed marketing staff, sharing practical knowledge and helping them build the skills and confidence to manage more of the work themselves.
- Providing an alternative to permanent hiring: Helping businesses without an established marketing team access experienced marketing professionals without the recruitment costs, training requirements and ongoing commitment of full-time appointments.
The level of support can change as your business develops, so you’re not paying for skills or capacity you don’t currently need.
Flexible marketing support as your business grows
Marketing requirements rarely stay the same throughout the year, especially in a growing business. There are several situations where flexible marketing support can be particularly useful:
- Launching a new product or service when your existing team needs additional campaign and content support.
- Improving your digital presence when you need specialist expertise in website management, SEO or digital campaigns.
- Implementing new marketing systems when your CRM, automation or reporting needs attention.
- Managing seasonal workloads when marketing activity increases for a particular period.
- Supporting an existing marketing team when there simply aren’t enough hours or specialist skills available internally.
Building a permanent team around every possible requirement can become expensive, particularly for South African businesses that need to manage their resources carefully.
A flexible marketing team gives you the option of accessing specialist expertise without committing to full-time roles that may not always be needed.
Making sure your marketing strategy gets delivered
A well-developed marketing strategy provides direction, but it’s the quality and consistency of the implementation that ultimately determines how much progress a business makes.
For many businesses, having the right strategic leadership is only part of the solution. They also need people with the time and skills to manage the everyday activities, solve problems and keep marketing projects moving.
That might mean supporting an existing marketing department, providing technical expertise for a particular project or helping a business manage its marketing activity without employing a large permanent team.
With the right combination of leadership and specialist implementation support, businesses can get considerably more from the marketing resources they already have, while accessing additional expertise when it’s needed.
Need help implementing your marketing strategy?
The Marketing Centre South Africa’s Activation Team provides flexible, hands-on marketing support to help businesses turn their strategies into consistent, well-managed activity.
Working alongside our experienced Fractional Marketing Directors, the team brings together the specialist skills and practical capacity needed to support your marketing objectives without the long-term commitment of building a larger permanent team.
If your business has a clear marketing plan but needs help getting everything done, we’d welcome a conversation about where additional support could make a difference.
Book a discovery call to find out how we can help.
