If your business relies heavily on a lucrative holiday season, you should seriously consider augmenting your marketing team with contract staffing to make the most of it this year.
Unless your marketing is incredibly disorganized, you’ve probably already outlined most of your holiday marketing planning and put the finishing touches on your major initiatives through the rest of the year. But in a digital era where brands are expected to respond to consumers’ needs at a moment’s notice and game-changing market events can disrupt your carefully laid campaigns, it’s a good idea to be ready when things don’t go according to plan.
Strategic acquisition of marketing staffing talent gives you extra flexibility to handle unforeseeable challenges at peak business times. That adaptability is especially important at a time when a lot of your team will be looking to take extended vacations and extra days off.
Black Friday is about three months away. If you start the search for contractors now, you should have just about the right amount of time to engage a marketing staffing firm, complete a thorough search for a good candidate, and get them properly on boarded before the chaos truly begins. Here are some of the marketing contractors you’ll probably find most useful in weathering this year’s winter storms:
Marketing Project Management Staffing
Even if your holiday marketing plan has already been hammered out, odds are good you’ll have some unexpected marketing projects crop up before and during the holidays. Maybe you’ll need to respond to a competitor’s campaign, or find a way to handle a surge in social media interaction with your customers. Regardless of the kind of marketing talent these projects will require, they’ll almost inevitably require hands-on management that’s working in the trenches with your teams to ensure everything is going smoothly.
Project management staffing is a reliable way to get access to professionals experienced at making things happen, even on tight deadlines. When your full-time management is occupied with executing on your previously established plans and occupied with the day-to-day demands of a leadership role in your organization, this is a great way to add extra team management capacity when you need it most for short-term project oversight.
Content Marketing Staffing
Consumption of all kinds of web content–videos, blogs, stories, news, graphics and more–increases during the holiday season as a whole and spikes during key times for industries like retail, hospitality, and travel that are busy during this time of year.
Exceptional content is one of the few reliable ways to still capture attention and engage consumers in a crowded media space. But great content requires great content marketing staffing, especially if your internal content marketing team is already operating at full capacity. That includes creative staffing to produce the actual content–but also analytical, leadership and technical experts needed to support them.
Ecommerce Staffing
Retail ecommerce holiday sales grew nearly 7% in 2014, enough to push the total to $102 billion. That figure is expected to grow another 14% this year. Seeing the growing popularity of Cyber Monday and mobile purchasing, brands are wisely stepping up their ecommerce game with highly optimized web buying experiences, sophisticated digital campaigns, and incredible online deals.
There will be a lot of noise in the ecommerce space toward the end of 2015, and only the most prepared brands will be able to stand out. If your online store doesn’t quickly offer what consumers expect, they won’t hesitate to abandon their shopping carts and move on to the next deal elsewhere. Ecommerce staffing can work with your ecommerce leadership during this time of peak demand to make sure your brand is delivering the most compelling possible experience that ultimately leads to a sale.
User Experience Staffing
When you’re pushing out a torrent of holiday marketing messages across an assortment of traditional and digital channels, it’s easy for messaging to get jumbled and for customer experiences to suffer, especially on your web properties. A poor experience not only kills immediate sales opportunities; it can also leave a lasting negative impression of your brand.
There are a lot of moving parts in UX, from design to technical infrastructure to cross-channel customer following. And you must be able to account for the growing number of different devices and screens consumers will be using to meet your brand online. User experience staffing makes sure your customers find your sites easy to navigate to find the information they want, the deals they expect, and make online purchasing effortless.
Advertising Coordinator Staffing
Timely, responsive advertising is critical for marketing success–and doubly so during the holidays. Your incredible deals and compelling messages will get you nowhere if nobody sees them. Having advertising staffing talent on hand improves your ability to create messages, design ads, and efficiently purchase both traditional media space and digital ads like PPC and display.
It might still be sunny and warm now, but it’s never too early to prepare for a cool holiday season. Don’t get caught off guard by a late-year marketing crisis: make sure you have the talent you need on hand and ready to respond to challenges at a moment’s notice.
