How In-house Marketing Teams can Avoid Bottlenecking with Overflow Support and Planning

Often, marketing teams manage heavy content strategies with limited resource. It may come to a point where they simply can’t manage everything that they set out to do.

In this situation, overflow support could be considered to help see out a successful strategy. This could be in areas such as content, graphic design, socials, or other creative outputs.

Below, GO! network member Stocks Taylor Benson give advice on how to avoid bottlenecking with overflow support and planning.

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Free-to-attend event: Investing in Content - Finding the Right Strategy for you.

When is the right time to engage in overflow support? 

According to Greg Jolley, Executive Client Director at Stocks Taylor Benson, the right time to engage in overflow support is “as soon as you identify a potential issue in either capacity or skillset.” 

As we discussed in a previous piece, capacity can be an issue for many marketing teams. Marketing, as a discipline, has changed greatly over the years. Modern marketers must now be proficient in multiple skillsets to do their jobs effectively. 

Couple this with a growing number of marketing tech and responsibility for revenue generation, and it’s easy to understand why marketing teams can be easily overstretched. 

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How do you ensure an agency is ‘on the same page’ when it comes to creative output? 

“Leaving things to the last minute and expecting an agency to drop everything to support you in the best way and provide the best work is unrealistic and not a great way of building a successful working relationship.” 

Instead, Greg recommends “getting the agency pre-prepared with the correct design guidelines, assets and working process before engaging with them on a particular creative brief is the best way to make sure they are ready and up to speed.

Make sure the brief is clear and has all the relevant information required. This includes budget (if possible,) and expectations in terms of deliverables and deadlines.”

How do you define what is in and out of scope for overflow?

One of the challenges of overflow support is defining what is in and out of scope. For Greg, this means “whatever you think you can’t handle internally or where you have a shortage of in-house capacity to meet a certain deadline.” 

Overflow for Content Marketing

In terms of content marketing, we previously asked our agency Network how people should manage with limited resource. Daniel Simmons, Founder of Populate Social says “It's about getting as much as you can out of the content for the time you have available. Prioritise the content that provides you with the most bang for your buck and ensure you make it work as hard as possible.

Ensure that the content you are putting out directs people to the relevant places, make sure you are capturing people when they hit your content (locked content etc.). There are also automation tools out there that can be used to support content creation. Perhaps these can be considered to increase cadence.

How about even leveraging other people within the business? Get the wider team involved."

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When should overflow support become permanent support? 

If you find yourself constantly needing overflow support for a particular thing, whether it be content, graphic design, SEO etc, it might be worth considering making this temporary overflow support permanent. We asked Greg when you should do this. 

“That’s a question for the client business. Balancing budgets and costs is an obvious factor, so knowing the potential volume and frequency of work is important to plan for. Engaging an agency to work in a long-term partnership can be a much better way of building a successful working relationship and improving value for money and quality of work.”

If you’re looking for overflow support, GO! can help. Let us know your challenge, and we’ll get to work! 

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