When to Hire a Marketing Operations Agency

Comedy isn’t the only place where timing really matters. Knowing when to add expertise or capacity is one of the trickiest parts of leading teams. Let’s decode the timing of hiring a marketing operations agency for you in this episode of Leverage Your Spark.

Marketing teams have lots to manage. And as a result, they usually wait too long to get the help they need. Anyone in marketing or business gets it: It feels almost impossible to create the space to think ahead. Instead, we wait until the pain is too acute and there is no bandwidth, mental space, or capacity left to get additional resources into the mix.

And we both know that the chances of things working out well for anyone when resources get added into chaos is very, very, tragically low.

Listen Episode 3: Episode 26

The “Why” Behind Marketing Operations

Marketing operations teams are there to help with the invention, processes, tech, and metrics so the implementation can be easier, faster, and smarter. In short, they help make more effective use of resources and improve the efficiency of the team’s work.

But when you want to do better with what you have, it isn’t quite like throwing a switch.

If you listened to the last episode on how to hire a marketing operations agency, you might recall that our process to get hired has six steps before implementation begins. This is important and necessary to deliver quality work, but it also means we need to be brought in before the crisis is eminent.

When Should You Hire a Marketing Operations Agency?

When you don’t have the mental space or time in your schedule to think strategically, it is exceptionally difficult to anticipate and plan how to support the marketing team for the next set of campaigns or events.

If you are already at this point, then the time has passed to hire a marketing operations agency. You may want to consider blocking off 90 minutes in the next couple of weeks to have some conversations with peers or prospective agencies and put together a plan.

Another way to assess the timing of when to hire a marketing operations agency can be based on upcoming campaigns or seasonal business impacts. Some of our clients have specific busy seasons or large events that tax their team, and these are the times when they also spend the bulk of their marketing budgets. Getting a marketing operations team engaged for an assessment well ahead of high-demand periods means that the team has bandwidth to get the marketing ops agency onboarded so that they can be contributing before everyone is slammed.

The Benefit of Hiring a Marketing Operations Agency

Marketing operations agencies can help teams get the best ROI on campaigns and big budget items by putting success metrics into place and ensuring the team has the process and technology to leverage the most bang for the marketing dollars.

If you’re not sure where to start with improved effectiveness for your marketing team, we can help. It can be as simple as assembling information so tasks can be delegated and completed faster. I’ve created the Website Quick Reference template to help teams like yours pull together the technical details for your website to avoid delays and whoopsies when dealing with the website. Grab your free template at getffx.com/website.