Adjusting to any kind of change is hard, if you’ve been used to traditional forms of marketing up to now, the change and adaptation to digital marketing can be difficult. There are different demands and formats for digital marketing, and your company may not have the skill or familiarity with the requisite technologies and software to adequately meet the demands of your changing moment. This is where interim marketing and interim marketers come in to help.
How can interim marketers help?
Interim marketers are, as their title would suggest, marketers for interim periods. You’d hire them for limited, fixed periods of time, to cover and head marketing projects with visible endpoints. You might have campaigns with seasonal requirements, there might be a brand or product launch, or any other kind of project that needs a specific field of marketing expertise for a certain period. It may well be that your company likely does not have the right mix of expertise internally, and so needs a knowledgeable and seasoned marketer on the team for an interim period to see the campaign through or to help them navigate a particular challenge or project.
Your own internal team might have a skill gap in the existing members, or might not be structured for the current challenge, project, or objective, meaning that you’d need support and expertise, but not necessarily on a permanent basis. As a result, some businesses favour using an interim marketer, rather than permanently adding to their headcount. This approach delivers the manpower boost or support needed and can be embedded into the existing structure with little trouble. It also sidesteps any long-term commitment of budget or resources you might need, an option not available if you were to commit to hiring additional manpower.
Access to additional technologies, and competencies with them
Interim marketers are expected to be flexible, and hiring the appropriate interim marketers most suited to your specific needs can cover many gaps and fill many demands that may come up in your potential launches and campaigns. If you are starting your transition from traditional forms of marketing to digital marketing, interim marketers can be of great help.
Digital marketing has different demands from traditional forms of marketing. Adapting to the demands of finding and interacting with an online audience means that familiarity with the relevant software is necessary. These software can be impenetrable to the uninitiated, and the technology and skills needed to fully utilise these vital software and technologies are constantly becoming increasingly technical and precise. What's more, these technologies are constantly changing and improving rapidly, making it hard to keep up, or even pick up.
As your company begins its digital transition, you might find that your in-house marketing team may lack the expertise needed to utilise these digital tools to the fullest. Or you may not have the spare budget to subscribe and have the latest necessary software and tools
By hiring interim marketers, this problem can be sidestepped. The interim marketers will have the skills, tools, and expertise with the relevant tools and technologies you need to coordinate and execute marketing campaigns comprehensively. They’ll know which technologies will be the most applicable to your situation and goals, as well as how to save both time and manpower.
Cut costly consulting fees
If you’ve had any interaction with a marketing consulting firm lately, odds are you were surprised at how quickly the fees added up. Even worse, you may have even been disappointed with the results. Businesses turn to marketing consultants for advice on optimising and improving campaigns, projects, and processes. But too often all they get are generic plans or hands-off advice from “experts” who may not even bother to come in and see how your company operated firsthand.
An interim marketing executive is almost always cheaper on a per-hour basis than a consultant counterpart. What’s more, they’ll usually work on-site with you, getting a vital first-hand perspective on your workplace culture, team capabilities, and business challenges. That makes them more effective than most consultants who prefer to scrutinise and advise from afar and will only visit your business occasionally, or not at all.
Hiring an interim marketer is also a more effective choice than just going to a consultancy. Hiring an interim marketer means that you’ll have set a course of action, with determined goals beforehand, and are just bringing on the expertise needed to reach that goal and complete the needed actions. It is a more certain expense than the open-endedness of hiring a consultant to direct you on the actions you may need to take.
The opportunity to scale up
Hiring an interim marketer can also open up opportunities that may not have been available to you before. Say you have a large, critical marketing campaign coming up fast? Need to digitally transform your business at an accelerated rate? This is the kind of large-scale investment you want to be executed diligently. Failure to execute means you’re not only wasting your resources; you’re also falling behind the competition.
It may be that your current leadership doesn’t have the time or talent to efficiently execute it. Or that the undertaking has a limited scope that doesn’t necessarily call for a new full-time addition to the leadership team.
By bringing in an additional resource of leadership and expertise in the form of an interim marketing executive to see it to completion without compromising on your other marketing endeavours, you give yourself more opportunities than would have been possible by yourself.
In conclusion,
In conclusion, interim marketing can help you with your digital transition on multiple fronts. They are a flexible font of knowledge, expertise, and resources, and finding the appropriate interim marketer for your problem or goal can do much to solve it. Interim marketing is a great way to quickly access and utilise technologies and software you may not have invested in yet, and interim marketing is a more affordable option than consulting. Interim marketing is also a great way to scale up and deliver more ambitious campaigns than you might normally be able to alone.