Economic downturns and recessions are not a new thing. You learn to expect their arrival following years of growth. In the business world companies experience ups and downs on a regular base.

What happens to their marketing when the business slows down?

Companies react differently to slowdowns. Some increase their spending on marketing as a means to help resuming growth, yet in most cases marketing is no different from other business functions, which means inevitable cost reduction.

In the past, when companies wanted to cut their marketing costs, they started with their outsourced marketing. The mindset was “let’s first protect our employees, then worry about the rest”.

However, the way marketing has evolved in recent years has made many marketing leaders rethink their strategy on in-house versus outsourced and resist the urge to cut outsourced marketing first. Marketing has become more complex, requiring a diverse mix of expertise and activities – product marketing, marcom, content, branding, lead gen, partners, digital, social, web, graphic design, marketing automation, events – to name some of them.

Few are the companies who can afford doing all these in-house and do it in the required capacity and quality. It makes much more sense to hire the services of marketing agencies and freelancers who possess and excel the specific expertise in need and keep a lean in-house marketing team.

In other words, outsourced marketing is no longer the icing on the cake. It is an essential ingredient in the making of the cake. It is no wonder that companies are expected to outsource more work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Marketing is one of the best places to start with.

In the marketing context, what makes COVID-19 different from other downturns?

There are several key differences. First of all, it’s the magnitude of effect. The world has literally changed, and marketing teams are expected to react fast and adjust their strategy to the new reality. They need the best marketing expertise they can get now. Most don’t have the time and budget to hire new staff and train existing staff.

Second, COVID-19 forced most of the companies to work for home (WFH) or work in a hybrid mode that combines WFH and office time. It pulled the rug out from under corporate policies that used to require employees to attend the office. All of a sudden, the old office attendance distinction between in-house marketing and outsourced marketing people has disappeared. And guess what? Companies and teams discovered that moving to remote work increased their productivity.

High-touch vs. low-touch service

CMOs and VPs of Marketing used to perceive outsourced marketing as a low-touch service, in which specific short-term tasks are handed out to agencies and freelancers. They do the work, send it back to the marketing team, and forget about it until the next task comes up.

There are two problems with low-touch service: one – it wastes your people’s time to provide constant direction and back-and-forth correction to people who are not involved in and do not understand the inside of your business; two – in many cases you give up on trying to outsource a task because you’re trying to avoid the first problem. “I’ll do it myself, it will be easier”. And so, you and your marketing team end up working on too many tasks while missing time for more important work.

Low-touch is the traditional way of outsourced marketing. In recent years, and more so during the current pandemic, marketing leaders have come to look for high-touch services. They need external marketing experts who can take on themselves significant parts of their marketing and run them end-to-end as if they are an integral part of the marketing team. They want experts who can communicate effectively with other stakeholders to achieve the goals: Management, Product, Sales, partners, media and customers.

In the COVID-19 reality, outsourcing large parts of your marketing to high-touch service providers is a smart move. It frees up valuable time and resources to focus on your strategy and react to the tectonic shifts in the market.