Should You Hire a VP of Marketing or an Inbound Marketing Agency?

August 21, 2018 |   5 minute read

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Should You Hire a VP of Marketing or an Inbound Marketing Agency?

Employers often reach out to us when they are trying to hire a VP of Marketing or Marketing Director, wondering how to recruit someone with marketing expertise, management experience, growth strategy knowledge, technical capabilities and excellent communication skills. It's a lot to ask of one person. Still, these employers are right on track — all those skills are essential to their marketing departments. The VP of Marketing Role is an important one, but before you onboard another employee, consider the foundational infrastructure and resources they will need in place to do their job: this is the expertise an inbound marketing agency has the capacity to provide.

If you're considering what the future role of marketing will look like at your company, It could require an investment internally or externally, but you have to determine which will provide the best return. Consider the benefits of each option.

Hire a VP of Marketing

A marketing VP is an expert at executing strategies, big picture projects, and corporate objectives. They monitor the sales teams and facilitate a results-based culture. They will focus on aiding the sales team, monitoring processes, and guiding sales targets to meet overall corporate objectives.

Make no mistake, this role is critical to your organization’s ongoing success and you will at some point in time need an executive who holds your brand’s strategy in hand to achieve your long-term strategic objectives.

But if you need to make a change to support your sales team right now, and you only have budget for one role, hiring a VP of Marketing may not be your best option.

And it won’t be the fault of the VP you hire. This role's macro level of focus does not leave time for creating engaging email content, devising enticing blogs to bring traffic to your website with social media, or mastering the power of software tools you need to stay relevant and competitive, such as HubSpot Marketing Software.

You can hire the best of the best, but if you need to increase your sales now, and are limited by budget, hiring the best VP of Marketing is not a quick way to fix the problem you are trying to solve, and will only frustrate your (and their) efforts. It takes time for any new employee to ramp up and learn the company, culture and software. Sure, they can be trained in new software and processes, but that will take away from the core responsibilities of their role. So what is your other option?

Hire an Inbound Marketing Agency: Seven Professionals for the Price of One VP of Marketing

Vp of marketing imageHiring an inbound marketing agency like Tangible Words gives you a team of seven experts — for the same price of that one VP.  You get the power of a whole team to address your immediate sales and marketing objectives. It’s the best way to ramp up support for your sales team so they can work more efficiently and effectively to close more sales deals, sooner.

Unlike a new hire, an inbound marketing agency uses proven ramp-up on-boarding processes, trialed and tested, to learn about your organization. Beyond company and culture, the software requires no additional training runway to get up to speed, because an inbound marketing agency knows HubSpot back-to-front. An agency fully onboarded and integrated in a fraction of the time that it would take an employee to do the same.

An inbound marketing agency can report directly to your sales leader so that every inbound effort is closely tied to the revenue goals your company has. Hiring an inbound marketing agency is the golden solution to getting above the $1-3 million per annum revenue threshold most companies at that life cycle stage face.  

A team of seven professionals can:

  • manage content planning, editorial calendars and delegation of writing tasks.

  • leverage email series automation — set up, planning and strategy for email creation, plus integration with existing workflows causing zero interruption

  • lead score: a streamlined approach to ensure collection of quality leads and lead nurturing for your sales team.

  • provide HubSpot inbound marketing software management and support — so you can focus on closing sales.

  • strategize for future growth while implementing current strategies and plans

Another major return on investment with an inbound marketing agency is the legion of happy customers you will have who will speak well of your company and generate leads organically. When your customers are happy and like working with you, they're going to tell other people. And you’ll have the infrastructure in place to quickly reach out to new customers and guide them all the way to the onboarding stage.

Get Results Like Area 9 Learning

Discover the success seen by one of our clients — Area 9 Learning. After just 30 Area9-Perfromance-Graph-No-Numbers-1-300x241days Tangible Words helped them see:

  • social media monthly clicks and interactions increase by 230%

  • 29% increase in website traffic

  • a total of $600,000 of added business after 5 months

With an award winning inbound marketing agency like Tangible Words, client success is top priority: it’s why we're in business. A devoted seven-person team can bring measurable success to your company: something to think about when considering whether to hire one employee or a team of seven (for the same price — or less!).

Tangible Words even provides support and training for your sales team.

Want to Learn More about Inbound Marketing?

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