Marketing and digital fields have steadily moved towards being analytical disciplines where the smartest moves are backed by data. That’s great for the most part, but it makes it harder and harder to justify trying out wild new ideas with uncertain ROI. Got a crazy idea that could either crash and burn or skyrocket your brand ahead of the competition? Clever marketing leaders like you can take advantage of a flexible marketing workforce solution to bring their innovations to life, while minimizing the fallout should they prove to be a dud.
Some new tactics aren’t difficult to try out. For instance, it’s a relatively simple matter to A/B test a new subject line for your email campaigns, or try out a new landing page format.
Others require a much larger commitment. Imagine you wanted to try out a brand new digital channel that no one on your team has any experience with. Or think of an innovative way your brand could take an advantage of emerging digital technology like VR or wearables.
If your business is the pioneer of a successful new idea, the returns can be massive. But making a big move like this requires a large upfront commitment of time, resources, and (most importantly) talent. If the tools and expertise to execute your new strategy aren’t in place, it’s doomed to fail.
Of course, even in the best-case scenario a good idea isn’t guaranteed to lead to ROI. From creative ad copy to product packaging, marketers routinely try out new ideas that fail. The difference here is that the cost of failure is so high, it turns innovative marketing leaders away from even trying it. Imagine investing in a brand new team of smart, talented marketing geniuses only to lay them off a few months later when your experiment doesn’t pan out.
That risk is dangerous to your business. It inhibits innovation and evolution. With new players entering nearly every market on a constant basis, it’s important to continuously find new ways to stand out from the crowd. If your marketing leaders are too paralyzed by fear of failure to try out game-changing new ideas, you’ll stagnate and get left in the dust of someone who was willing to accept that risk.
Fortunately there’s a way to indulge your inner marketing mad scientist without tying your business to long-term employment obligations: contract marketing and digital staffing.
Flexible Solutions for Tackling Your Big Marketing Experiments
Could outstanding video content revolutionize your marketing? What about building a big presence on that hot new social network? Or using a sophisticated analytics tool just put on the market to find new prospects?
There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to try it.
If you’ve been in marketing long enough, odds are good that at some point you’ve had some grand idea for your business that you just couldn’t attempt because the cost of failure was too great. In particular, the burden on your organization of bringing in additional expertise and production capacity in the form of new employees for an idea that might not pan out is often considered untenable. Why risk so many resources on a major move when you can play it safe?
But playing it safe won’t keep you ahead in today’s competitive marketing environment. Eventually you’ll have to take some chances, or slowly fade into irrelevance. Contract digital staffing makes those risks far more tolerable by removing the indefinite costs and commitments associated with adding a new full-time expert or team to your department. That enables you to give your experiment the best odds of success, while also hedging your bets in case you need to change directions down the line.
If you’re not familiar with staffing, it’s simple. First, find the expertise you need through an experienced, focused digital staffing agency. Those professionals will work with you on-site on an hourly basis, for pre-specified period of time. You use that time (weeks, months, or years) to see your idea come to fruition and determine the viability of your brainchild. Meanwhile, there’s no addition to your headcount (the contractors are employees of your staffing partner).
Smooth Transitions Into the Future
One of the most powerful benefits of digital staffing is that it empowers you to smoothly scale up or down on your experiment once you learn whether it’s working.
If you find that your new idea isn’t working as well as you had hoped, then it’s a relatively simple matter of letting your interim marketers’ contracts expire. Then you’re free of employment obligations, and can move on to the next idea without getting held back.
If the idea shows great potential, then you have a strong foundation to build a long-term team and infrastructure to support it. You’ll often be able to bring your staffing on full-time through contract to hire marketing arrangements. There will also be the opportunity to extend contracts and expand your team with the addition of new staffing.
