Marketers are increasingly on the hook to demonstrate return on investment.
According to a recent Gartner report, marketing budgets are starting to slow down in 2017-18 from the past years, and with marketing taking 11.3 percent of a business’ overall budget, it’s important to show the money goes to solutions that work.
It’s not time to panic. But it is time to think smarter about where to spend money.
And that means finding the right people for the job; after all, it’s a chief marketing officer’s biggest chunk of change. Last year, CMOs spent more than half their budgets (53 percent) on labor costs and services alone. (CMO Spend Survey 2017-18).
Budget cuts, efficiencies and the gig economy have contributed to an environment where partnering with outside experts on a project basis makes a lot of sense. Also, as communications strategies get bigger and more complicated, requiring market research, data-driven decisions, and cohesive branding and messaging, it’s near impossible to do it all alone.
Agencies vs. Freelance vs. Talent Clouds
When companies are ready to outsource, they may opt for the traditional route of an agency or management consultant to handle large campaigns and projects. But these come with steep prices and the possible loss of creative control.
In today’s gig economy, freelancers are certainly an affordable option. It reduces overhead costs and gives companies a wider range of skill sets, while keeping the vision in house.
Yet, finding the right talent fit can sometimes be like online dating--there are a lot of hits and misses. We know because frustrated corporations have been coming to our sister company Creatives On Call for two decades because of its expertise in fitting the “right” freelance marketing and creative professionals into their organizations.
But even if companies find the “right” person, they discover freelancers don’t exclusively work for them or that one person isn’t capable of individually handling large comprehensive projects or engagements.
Technology certainly has made it easier to resource up. There’s been an explosion of platforms to help find and manage freelance staff. Sites like 10x Management source high-level tech workers. Beamery is a software company that lets companies manage in-house and freelance talent by task. Yet companies still must find and vet the freelancer and in many organizations, HR doesn’t understand marketing and creative needs.
Until now, there were very few companies providing access to top-tier, on-demand, vetted contract marketing teams with specialized skills.
That’s changed with the launch of VennQuelle.
As a new workforce on-demand team talent provider, we enable employers to build and manage marketing and creative teams that can take on big jobs for big players. Employers can tap a talent pool of 15,000+ professionals at their top of their game covering thousands of skills. These are copywriters, brand designers, marketing strategists and marketing automation specialists teams with a broad range of skills and expertise. Setting us apart is our use of machine learning, proprietary algorithms and obsessive human curation to match the right teams to clients based on professional experience and high specialization within minutes, saving companies the time-intensive and costly hiring process.
Hiring marketing and creative teams from a consultancy like VennQuelle also ensures that marketing managers are getting the freshest thinking and ideas. Associates in VennQuelle’s talent cloud are professionals who are up to speed on latest technologies and software and are well-versed in working with different clients across different industries.
This goes a long way to help build communication and trust between clients and talent, especially amid the pressure to launch new strategies with social media, live and video.
But most important, it gives a company control of the financial health of their project. VennQuelle allows for tailor-made solutions executed by the companies themselves. That’s because VennQuelle is curating, not managing talent. As a project moves from phase to phase, we help companies decide what resources are needed. We’ll engage more of the right resources to get a job done or scale back instantly as needed. Our consultancy fills your need to find the right person to lead strategy, spearhead project management and make sure your deadlines are met. But the control is in the hands of the company.
So how do you choose?
For a prospective company looking to execute large projects, many things need to be considered no matter what route you go. Some questions you should be asking are:
What’s best for my bottom line? How is my marketing team’s workload currently? How can bringing in teams improve my marketing ROI?
And as with any project, it’s important that you first define exactly what you need and if you don’t know how to do that, VennQuelle can help.
Working with VennQuelle’s seasoned professionals means tapping into a vast well of experienced, committed individuals who have perfected ways to help define goals and deadlines. In addition, they believe in constant responsive communication and are agile enough to adapt to the demands and challenges of different projects.
There are still huge inefficiencies as large corporations come to terms with shifting workforce strategies. Intuit estimates that by 2020, 43 percent of the U.S. workforce will be part of the gig economy.
Smart marketing leaders, under the gun to implement more streamlined and cost-effective business practices, are taking advantage of the gig economy to source highly qualified talent. And with a company like VennQuelle, finding a highly skilled, flexible workforce to increase productivity, boost customer satisfaction and improve the bottom line is just a click away.