How to scale without hiring more growth marketers?

Your business is growing. You are officially scaling and as a founder you could not be more proud. It is what you have worked so hard for to achieve.

But to grow, you need more customers. To handle those customers, you need more material and/or employees. To buy more material and pay those employees, you need more revenue. For that, you need more customers who will pay you in return for your services or products. You guessed it, we are back where we started.

Scale-ups are continuously going around in this circle, where ideally every one of these segments pulls the other one up for growth.

Of course, this is a simplified description of how growth is achieved, but do this correctly, and you will see results. You are in the upwards spiral and scaling in a healthy, confident and steady manner. If one of these segments is out of balance, however, you get stuck. Your extra staff and materials are useless if you do not achieve a client increase. If you do not have sufficient revenue, you cannot afford material and salaries, which in turn means you are not able to help your clients as you should.

As with so many things in business, without a growing revenue, you are stuck. That means that you need more convertible leads to increase your client base and bond more loyal customers to your brand. Solid Growth marketing methods and an educated marketing team are essential for growth.

From this, many founders conclude that expanding their marketing team will automatically increase the number of valuable leads for sales. What if I told you that there is a more efficient way to scale without expanding your company payroll?

Outsourcing growth marketing for scale-ups

Outsourcing growth marketing is an attractive solution for scale-ups, and I have seen it work a number of times. It saves you money and allows you to allocate your specialists in a more precise and efficient way.

What does outsourcing growth marketing involve? It means hiring marketing specialists to achieve healthy growth with you. I will use an example to clarify this further. At SUM Digital, we act as an outsourced growth marketing team to our clients. They need our help getting into that upward spiral I described above, so we optimize their marketing strategies and implement the tools they need to go at it alone. Once this is all up and running, their core team takes over the practical marketing tasks. We support from the sidelines to make sure the trend line keeps going upwards and growth is not only initiated, but also durable in the long run.

Outsourced vs. in-house growth marketing

Our clients are sometimes hesitant when I suggest we act as their outsourced growth marketing team. They are worried about growing their business, but not allowing the size of their marketing team to evolve as well.

Their worry is understandable. Therefore, I like to explain the role of an outsourced marketer by comparing it to that of a navigator on a ship. You hire their services when you need them, for example when leaving or entering the harbor, when planning a route, or when sailing through a heavy storm. At other moments, you can operate fine with your own crew, but your navigator is still available, providing advice and ready to step in when needed.

A growth marketing team works in a similar way. They have the knowledge to take over when they are needed, and support you from the sidelines when they are not. That saves you money, without losing the expertise. Together we will work at hitting your growth targets and objectives. You will not only have a solid marketing strategy in place, we have also initiated growth. Your core marketing team can build on and drive this growth, while we make sure it remains continuous.

The advantages of an outsourced growth marketing team

I strongly believe that most scale-ups and founders aiming for growth would greatly benefit from outsourcing their growth marketing work. There are so many advantages.

• A permanent position in your marketing team is more expensive than hiring an entire growth team.
• You pay only for the services delivered and not for idle time or payroll administration.
• Growth marketing teams are experienced and do not need much training.
• In-sourced employees transfer new ideas, fresh knowledge, and experience.
• You can always fall back on the expertise of the growth marketing team.

What can you do yourself?

There are a few other ways in which you can scale without hiring more marketers. You can invest in education, knowledge transfer and developing specialties for your current marketing team, for example. AI and automation are both tools which can take over some of the work, if implemented properly. And optimizing your workflow and processes is always a good idea as well.

To be honest, these measures should be part of your scaling strategy anyway. And those are also typical tasks that you could outsource to a growth marketing team. There is a pool of knowledge out there, from which you can benefit, by letting them jump in when needed.

Growth marketing for your scale-up

We have helped many founders like you into the upwards spiral and beyond. They used the expertise of our growth marketing team when they needed it most and took back the control with their core team when they were able. Let us turn your fluctuating results into a solid upwards trend line as well. Book your discovery call with one of our Growth Consultants.