Consumers love trying new things, especially when it comes to digital and mobile technology. As marketers, it’s our job to keep up, and that feels like a lot of work because, well, keeping up is a huge job. We need to understand the channel, determine how and why it’s favoured by consumers, devise a way to incorporate it into the bigger picture and figure out what it all means for the future. It’s a tall order, to be sure.
Many marketers bemoan what they see as a continuously expanding mission with few increases in staff to support it. Feeling their pain, we decided to quantify the complaint. Between February and March, we surveyed 240 digital marketers at Fortune 500 companies about their staffing levels. Here’s what we learned.
First the good news: Unlike other sectors of the economy, most marketing organisations aren’t downsizing; only 19% have decreased staff over the past two years. In fact, 41% of respondents have upped their headcount, bringing much-needed relief to marketing teams. Around 39% of respondents say their staffing levels have stayed the same.
Of course, staffing changes vary by organisation. Those brands whose marketing departments identify themselves as “innovators” have increased staffing at an accelerated pace, with 61% of them reporting adding new headcounts over the past two years. Marketing groups that rely more heavily on traditional marketing, and which allocate less than half of their marketing spend towards digital, kept staffing at the same levels or even let a few folks go over the same timeframe.
But as social media, native advertising, content and image marketing rise in importance, will those trends change? Some 54% of marketers surveyed anticipate changes in staffing levels, with 9% saying it was a “very likely” event for their organisations.
Not surprisingly, the organisations that self-identified as bleeding-edge innovators (9% of respondents) or results-based, campaign-driven organisation that excel at digital (15% of respondents) expect to see the most gains in headcount.
About that mission creep
Are our jobs really expanding, or does it just feel that way? Laurent Faracci, SVP of Global Marketing and Digital Excellence at RB, identifies several trends that are indeed upping our workload. For instance, he says that while marketing once focused on branding, innovation and customer communication, today’s marketing department “plays on a number of more direct levels of value creation and revenue generation, but still [keeps] the consumer at the core.”
He also points out that once upon a time, especially in broadcast and traditional arenas, marketers needed to craft just a handful of perfect pieces of content. Now, with the rise of native, social, and image marketing, content creation is fast, furious and voluminous.
So does this mean that marketing organisations must swell or bust? To Mr. Faracci, maybe not.
“Because the marketing teams are doing so much more these days, the immediate reaction is to increase staffing levels,” he says. “While understandable, this is an overly simplistic approach. In many ways, the new remits of marketing are less about ‘I need a new body to do x’ than about redefining priorities, finding new systems and tools to foster productivity, and, above all, growing your teams’ core competencies.”
In other words, instead of a knee-jerk reaction to add headcount, CMOs should think long and hard on what it would take to create conditions that prompt current employees “think big, to try new, fail fast often to win bigger, and learn more in the long run.”
By Ben Plomion, CMO at GumGum
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