What To Do If Clients Don’t Have the In-House Resources for Inbound

You would never expect your contractor to build your house without wood, nails, drywall, and concrete. It’s the same with any business. If your clients’ marketing departments don’t have the proper resources in place, they will never be able to build an effective inbound marketing machine.

A lack of resources and personnel slows down marketing departments. It causes a disconnect between campaigns, the marketing and sales staff, and performance analyses. This kind of inefficiency makes it impossible for organizations to successfully implement inbound methods. Plus, launching campaigns with limited resources sets them up for a poor ROI and future headaches.

Learn how to spot whether your clients are lacking the necessary marketing resources, what caused the gaps, and what marketing consultants can do about it.

How Do You Know?

While you evaluate your clients’ marketing and sales atmosphere, it’s important to watch for missing pieces. Some red flags marketing consultants need to watch out for are:

• Inconsistent content distribution
• Poor content quality
• Poor qualifying of incoming leads
• Low campaign conversion rates
• Missed deadlines
• Staff working overtime to meet deadlines
• Sales and marketing misalignment
• Limited or missing campaign analyses
• Little or no social media presence
• Analytics rarely impacting strategy

What’s Causing the Marketing Gap?

There are a few reasons why an organization may be lacking the right personnel or skill sets in the marketing department. First is a small budget. For many smaller businesses, there isn’t enough in the marketing budget to add all the skilled employees necessary to run an inbound strategy.

Secondly, the team might have gaps in qualifications or skills. This is not to say in-house teams are not talented or hardworking, but they might have gaps in development, design, or copywriting that limit their strength.

Lastly, a general lack of awareness by marketing leaders might result in poor resource management or hiring gaps. As a marketing consultant, it is your job to advise where these gaps lie and how to fill them.

What Should You Do?

Once you have diagnosed an in-house marketing gap that needs fixing, it’s time to make the big decision. Do you suggest your client hire and add more resources to its in-house team? Or do you suggest partnering with an inbound marketing agency?

Hiring in-house talent or freelancer support is not a bad idea and can be beneficial to small businesses whose teams can improve with one or two key hires. When discussing this option, take into account the cost of recruitment, hiring, onboarding, and training a new hire. Plus, consider benefits, office equipment, and technology needs. While this option works for some clients, sometimes the cost of adding multiple skilled marketers far outweighs the cost of partnering with an inbound marketing agency.

Working with an agency adds an entire team of writers, SEO experts, developers, designers, and social media specialists to your client’s marketing roster—immediately! The experts at an inbound agency hit the ground running. They have the experience, tools, and training to implement and manage your client’s marketing plan while adding another level of support. While your client’s in-house team may get sidetracked by other tasks or depleted during holidays, an agency is always accountable to your client.

Marketing consultants have the difficult job of being honest with marketing leaders about their teams’ strengths and weaknesses. While some of these weaknesses can be fixed in-house, many organizations end up turning to an agency in the future.

If your clients have hit a plateau in lead generation, are having trouble keeping up with their marketing plan, or don’t have the resources to get their strategies off the ground, it’s time to partner with an inbound agency.