How to grow your marketing team during a recession.

Growing your marketing team during a recession might seem outside the realm of possibility, but it’s not. You just have to think outside the box. Hiring an external agency or freelancer is a great way to grow your business and team.

A complete team today doesn’t have to include individuals who show up to the office Monday through Friday. The flexibility of WFH has made employees happier and more productive. As such, hiring an agency or freelancer emulates our current work culture, it’s cheaper than hiring more full-time employees and more versatile.

Here are a few areas of focus when hiring external help.

Hire an agency or freelancer for organic growth

Grow your marketing team during the recession and hire a digital marketing agency to optimise your SEO practices. We love SEO and blog posts because it’s the best ways to grow organically. Let your value proposition speak before encouraging sales.

There are different areas of SEO you can target. Technical SEO focuses on meta-descriptions and alt tags. It’s all about building the framework of your website. A healthy back-end requires great technical SEO.

Another SEO practice is ensuring that the keyword density of your website is optimal at 2.2%. Ensure that this is the case after you launch new product ranges.

Copywriting in essence improves SEO as it’s an influx of keywords. Look into what keywords are trending in relation to your website and create blog posts to re-direct organic traffic from your competitors, to your own website.

Hire a partner to focus email marketing to increase your ROI.

Another area to request your digital marketing agency or freelancer to focus on is Email Marketing. It’s one of the cheapest ways to retain customers, win them back, and spread brand awareness.

It’s also a task that you can hire someone to work on every three or two months depending on your budget. This is going to be cheaper than hiring a full-time employee.

Work on creating a strategy around pre-conversion and post-transaction subscribers.

Automations can become passive income with little to no spending, resulting in a high ROI. But to get there someone needs to continuously work on A/B testing, quick wins and identifying opportunities for growth.

Outsource your ads to a digital marketing agency during the recession.

If you need a marketing team member with Google Ads experience, outsource an agency. Not only is it cost-efficient, but you can also cancel your partnership whenever you’re ready to hire internally.

Google Ads and Meta Ads can prove to be complicated and time-consuming. Out of all the digital marketing services you need to outsource, this is the one that we recommend the most. Getting someone else to do your ads allows you to focus on what you do best, and to grow your business. All you have to do is set a budget and the goal of your ads and an agency can do the rest for you.

Increase brand awareness by hiring a brand ambassador.

Apart from hiring a digital marketing agency during a recession to build your marketing team or a freelancer you can also build connections with influencers. Hire a brand ambassador to spread brand awareness and build your customer base. It’s a great way to build a loyal repeat customer.

Building a community is an efficient tool to build brand awareness. This can be done via email marketing, blog posting and collaborations. Taking on a brand ambassador is key when you want to reach out to high-quality leads and build your community further.

In terms of audience insight, hiring a brand ambassador can teach you what your audience responds well to. And who they are. Following a campaign, is there a spike in a certain demographic? Do the brand-ambassador followers respond to certain products more than others? Why do you think that is?

Collaborate with businesses that share your values.

Another great way to increase your marketing team during a recession is by collaborating with businesses you share an audience with. Focus on businesses and brands that sell in a different category than you do. The product or services are supposed to add to yours, not take away.

The aim of any collaboration is to share audiences and build a stronger community. In dire times of recession working together is far more profitable than competing for the same set of individuals. Stronger in numbers!

Create value-based incentives.

Sometimes growing your team means letting your customers do it for you. Create value base programs such as refer-a-friend to let your email subscribers spread the word, and reward them and their friends with a discount code on their next purchase.

Another way to encourage your brand-following to grow your customer base is to run social media competitions. You can do this in collaboration with another brand, or by yourself. Ask your social media followers to tag a friend and comment on why they love the brand to receive a gift of some sort. Announce the winner and tag them for user-generated content, building a community and spreading joy.

Be consistent in your social media output - hire an automated program.

Our final way to grow your marketing team during a recession isn’t necessarily a person. It’s a tool or an automated program to ensure that you continuously post on social media.

With limited time and staff shortage, automating your social media posts can help free up much-needed time. Although growing your social media presence takes time, care and love - you might not have the capacity to. Set aside 10 minutes a day to respond to messages and comments. Automate your social media posts for the next two weeks using Hootsuite of Meta’s own planner program.

Using a one-stop-shop isn’t going to grow your social media accounts at an accelerated rate. You can also hire an agency to work on your social media management. Set up a bi-weekly call to get updates on the latest insights and set goals for the next couple of weeks. It’s more costly but you have less work and there will be no need to set 10 minutes a day going through comments and messages. And we all know 10 minutes can easily turn into 35.

We hope that you enjoyed our tips on how to grow your marketing team during a recession. For more information about Vinni Agency please visit our home page.