Aquent/AMA Webcast: Flexible Workforce Strategies to Improve Your Marketing Team's Effectiveness
•Download as PPT, PDF•
0 likes•665 views
Two-thirds of marketers working 51 or more hours a week rate their work life as "extremely stressful"—more than double the rate of those working 40 hours or less. Job dissatisfaction and turnover significantly hurts the output and effectiveness of marketing teams. Leveraging a flexible workforce can help alleviate these pains. In this webcast session presented by Eric Waldinger, SVP, Group Managing Director of Aquent, you'll learn about findings from a new survey of global marketing teams and their use of freelance talent and ad agencies.
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (19)
Viewers also liked
Similar to Aquent/AMA Webcast: Flexible Workforce Strategies to Improve Your Marketing Team's Effectiveness
Similar to Aquent/AMA Webcast: Flexible Workforce Strategies to Improve Your Marketing Team's Effectiveness (20)
More from Aquent
More from Aquent (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Aquent/AMA Webcast: Flexible Workforce Strategies to Improve Your Marketing Team's Effectiveness
- 1. Flexible Workforce Strategies to Improve Your Marketing Team’s Effectiveness In this webcast presented by Eric Waldinger, SVP, Group Managing Director of Aquent, we share findings from a new survey of global marketing teams and their use of freelance talent and ad agencies. Some of the key points are... > How and why marketing teams split their resources among independent contractors, ad agencies, and staffing firms > What impact flexible talent has on retaining top permanent staff > Where and why marketing teams most often use flexible talent > What the most common mistakes marketers make when using flexible talent and how your firm can avoid them
- 2. Flexible Workforce Strategies to Improve Your Marketing Team’s Effectiveness Presented by: Eric Waldinger, SVP, Group Managing Director, Aquent
- 4. The Most Boring (and Perhaps Important) Slide You’ll See All Day Company Conducts Business, Has Marketing/Creative Team With a pure probability sample of 523, one could say with a 95 percent probability that the overall results have a sampling error of +/- 4.2 percentage points. Sampling error for data from sub-samples is higher and varies. Job Role Individual Contributor 10% VP/Director 32% Manager 43%
- 6. Your Marketing Team is Pulling Hard…Can They Hold? Pull Trying Teamwork!
- 7. How Far is Too Far? Your Internal team might be pulling too hard: Hours Worked Per Week My Work Life is Extremely Stressful 1 st Sign: They’re Stressed
- 8. How Far is Too Far? Your internal team might be pulling too hard: 2nd Sign: They can’t meet their objectives. Hours Worked Per Week Our marketing team has the resources necessary to meet our organization’s objectives.
- 12. Start With The Easiest Things to Outsource Situations Where Marketing Teams Leverage Flexible Talent Opportunity?
- 14. The Average Assignment Lasts More than 15 Weeks.
- 16. Identify High Priorities for Your In-House Team
- 17. Analyze Your Current Team’s Capabilities What is your team’s core competency? Primary Reason for Bringing Contingent Workers On-Site
- 18. Flexible Talent: Used Often and Increasing Nearly two-thirds of marketing/creative teams outsource at least some of their work to flexible labor pools. Fact: Average Organizational Allocation of Marketing/Creative Work
- 19. Internal Headcount Growth? A Tale of Perspective Marketing team members were nearly twice as likely as C-level respondents to expect their marketing team to grow headcount in the next 12 months. Fact: Percent Expecting Marketing Team Internal Headcount to Grow
- 20. Flexible Talent: Expected to Increase Although use of all types of flexible workforce resources are expected to grow in the next year, use of independent contractors is projected to grow the most. Fact:
- 22. MYTH 1: Flexible Talent are Best Used for Low Skillset Marketing Tasks.
- 23. MYTH 2: Flexible Talent Turnover is Too High, You Have to Constantly Train New People. What you can do to build a reliable and capable pool of freelance talent…
- 24. MYTH 3: If You Don’t Plan Ahead You Shouldn’t Bother.
- 26. CONCLUSION
- 28. inavero is a global leader in client and job seeker satisfaction surveys. The firm analyzes surveys from more than 500,000 job seekers and professionals annually.
Editor's Notes
- 1- Today we will be talking about emerging trends for 2011.
- 57% of organizations in the study had operations that went beyond the United States in scope. One third of all marketing/creative teams utilized resources outside of the United States as part of their team. Aquent Database – 261 responses Independent Online Panel – 262 responses Total sample size – 523 responses TALK TRACK: I promise we’ll get to both strategic and tactical discussions around your marketing team and the flexible talent you leverage, but it is important to recognize where this research comes from and know that you can trust the information. The data we’ll be discussing is based on more than 500 survey responses from global marketing leaders and team-members. 57 percent of the organizations had operations beyond the U.S. in scope, and roughly a third had marketing teams that spanned two or more countries.
- TALK-TRACK: Marketers are continuously being asked to not only understand but have command of a wide variety of different marketing tools, techniques and systems. In Aquent’s salary survey a year ago, marketers were complaining about being overwhelmed with the work they needed to complete, but it is going even further. How much is too much? When does “busy” become “unproductive” or “burned out” or “former employee”?
- Two-thirds of marketers who work more than 50 hours per week believe their work life is “extremely stressful”. The percentage of people who “strongly agree” their work life is very stressful is twice as high for those working more than 50 hours per week. TALK TRACK: When marketers work long hours, it takes its toll on them and they end up reporting significantly higher levels of work-related stress and lower job satisfaction. With the challenge of attracting and retaining the top marketing talent, what can you do to maximize the impact of your team while not burning them out or causing them to leave the organization?
- Those working 51 or more hours are significantly less likely to think they have the resources they need to accomplish their goals. This is especially important as this has a stronger correlation to overall job satisfaction than whether people feel overwhelmed at work. Said another way, marketers are willing to handle being stressed and overwhelmed if they believe they are achieving their team’s objectives, but have a hard time being satisfied when they feel they can’t meet those objectives. TALK TRACK: Optimizing your team and the resources available to your team are important elements in the game of attracting and retaining top marketing talent. What can your team do to maximize the value you get? That is the discussion for today – what do top marketing teams do to maximize their output? What do they do with their internal team, what do they do with their flexible workforce, and what are the best practices along the way?
- TALK TRACK: There are keys to making sure your team is successful, and it starts with your focus and knowing where you are going. You have to realize you (and your team) can’t do everything and prioritize what makes most sense to your in-house team. Once you know what is important you have to determine how that matches up with your team’s current capabilities and look to maximize your internal skillset and blend that with external resources as needed.
- TALK TRACK: We’re in the season of planning. And this plays a fundamental role in how you invest in your internal and flexible marketing/creative team. What is your organization trying to accomplish in this next year? What are the key components of that which will drive success? As you look at it, what do you need to do now to make sure you are successful later? Too often, we see people in a reactive mode to not just their marketing teams, but also their marketing plans. Plans change of course, but you need to have a vision for where you are headed, which will help you drive what you need to be world-class at and what you need to leverage external, world-class resources for.
- TALK TRACK: Marketers are generally optimists…..often too optimistic and not able to effectively predict how resource-intensive different aspects of their projects and objectives will be. We’re also high achievers typically. This is why we are more dissatisfied if we don’t feel like we can be successful and achieve our organization’s (and marketing team’s) goals than we are if to do it we feel a great deal of job-related stress. So…..what does that mean for our team? You have to understand it isn’t reasonable to do everything yourself, and especially when you look into the negative impact that can have on your core team – those who are responsible for on average, three-fourths of your marketing/creative output.
- TALK TRACK: A good place to start is where it is easiest to utilize external flexible resources – and that is often around short, at times unexpected fill-in roles. Three-fourths of marketing teams indicated they used flexible talent at least some of the time to help offset headcount freezes or for seasonal work spikes. Another way to look at that top talent – whether they are working independently, or through an agency or staffing firm, is as your future internal team. Pick people externally who you would like to have internally and use defined projects to test people before making a full-time hire out of them. We also found in the study that projects are less likely to leverage flexible marketing talent. These are also some of the areas where internal teams get most pressed, so could be an opportunity to optimize what your team is already doing.
- How long does the typical workforce assignment last? The answer might surprise you.
- The right answer is between 3 and 4 months. The average assignment is longest for staffing firm temporary employees. Even though roughly half of all assignments last less than a month, the average of all flexible workforce assignments in the marketing/creative space is between 11 and 17 weeks. Larger organizations tend to be more proactive about placements and engage their flexible workers in longer-term assignments.
- TALK TRACK: The answer is SEO, although e-commerce related projects are also often going outside for additional resources and expertise.
- TALK TRACK: What are the highest priorities in your office? If you produce a lot of content, perhaps it is a core function of your team to be able to handle your own writing and editing projects. There are a number of new and emerging tools that marketers are asked to master, and these are the most often outsourced to flexible talent. Looking at the top project that is outsourced, SEO, and you’re likely better off to get experts working on your behalf. Do you need this expertise in-house? Most of us don’t. That is a great role for an expert, often a firm that focuses on SEO, but at times you can find a freelancer to help your team build the strategy and tactics required to improve the SEO.
- TALK TRACK: When looking at bringing temporary staff or independent contractors onsite for a project, there are two core reasons that drive the decision typically. It is usually either because your team doesn’t have the time, but does have someone who can lead the project from an expertise standpoint, or because they lack expertise completely to effectively lead a project of that caliber. What is interesting, is that cost savings is not often the primary reason for using flexible labor, much less likely selected than other reasons. Not that it isn’t a determination, but what contingent labor brings to the table is flexibility and expertise, not necessarily cost savings on an hourly or project-related basis.
- TALK TRACK: The majority of marketing and creative work is conducted in-house, yet nearly a quarter of it is done using external resources and nearly two-thirds of marketing/creative teams outsource at least a bit of their marketing and creative work. Interestingly, independent contractors represent the most used resource with 8 percent of marketing/creative work being done by these individuals. Clearly the first step is to maximize your internal team, which we’ll talk about, but it is also critical to get the most from these external resources – an area many marketing teams overlook or don’t look at strategically enough.
- TALK TRACK: Marketing team members and leaders were twice as likely as c-level respondents to expect their in-house marketing team to grow headcount in the next 12 months, which puts even more pressure on these marketing teams to continue to become more efficient and effective to reach their objectives successfully.
- TALK TRACK: While many marketing teams are using flexible talent somewhat, even more are looking to increase that utilization in the next 12 months. The biggest increase is expected to be within the area of Independent Contractor usage, with 35 percent of marketers indicating they expected this to increase, but across the board close to 20 percent or more of marketers expected their teams to leverage each of the flexible resources above as part of their marketing team. It is clear that getting strategic about these resources is going to be important to the success of your teams. 35% of marketing leaders expect their marketing team to increase their utilization of independent contractors, compared to 10 percent who expect their use to decrease. Similarly, 24% expect utilization of marketing/creative temporary employees to increase compared to 11% expecting to use the resource less in the next 12 months.
- TALK TRACK: There are a number of myths that exist when it comes to flexible talent and understanding those myths can be critical to maximizing your current team and the flexible resources at your disposal.
- This is a more consultative slide, with experiences from Aquent and case studies helpful here.
- This is a more consultative slide, with experiences from Aquent and case studies helpful here.
- While there are benefits to being more proactive (those that are, report working more often with flexible talent, and typically have longer projects), the biggest impacts on employee satisfaction and feeling able to meet marketing objectives happen when marketing teams don’t staff up at all. Better late than never!
- To recap there are 5 main components to ensuring that you get the right mix to improve your marketing teams effectiveness. The first and major step to to get your plan in place. One this is accomplished you can begin to plan a head to fill any holes Secondly realizing that you cant do everything is a major step so you need to identify what are the most important high priority areas that your in-house team should focus on. Once that is decided then you need to ensure that the skill sets on your team match your goals. Once these steps are accomplished you can truly plan on how you will leverage the 25% of your extended flexible workforce teams. Having the right mix of flexible workforce solutions of Staffing, IC and Agency’s will ensure that you get the most out of your internal and external teams Thank you all for your time and lets open it up to questions.
- Today we reviewed the top trends that are happening today The convergence of SEO and Search, Mobile Marketing Integrated user experience. We hope that this and the over view of the type of people you need to execute on these trends will give you insight on how to begin to build towards the future.
- Today we reviewed the top trends that are happening today The convergence of SEO and Search, Mobile Marketing Integrated user experience. We hope that this and the over view of the type of people you need to execute on these trends will give you insight on how to begin to build towards the future.
- Inavero, a global leader in client and job seeker satisfaction surveys, conducted the 2011 Flexible Staffing Survey in partnership with Aquent.