Resourcing Strategy: Hiring Full-Time Employees, Agencies & Freelancers

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Key Takeaways

• A strong marketing resourcing strategy balances flexibility and expertise. Modern teams perform best when they mix full-time employees, agencies, and freelancers to stay agile through shifting priorities and market conditions.
• Each resourcing option serves a distinct purpose. Full-time employees drive continuity, deep integration, and leadership; agencies provide scale, specialized expertise, and speed to market; and freelancers offer flexibility, niche skill sets/specialization, and cost efficiency.
• The right mix depends on company stage, goals, and capacity. Growth-stage brands often need hybrid structures—core full-time leadership supported by agency partners or freelance talent for execution.
• A well-defined resourcing strategy prevents burnout and skill gaps. It ensures the right people are in the right roles at the right time, helping teams meet growth targets efficiently.
• Right Side Up helps brands design modern marketing organizations. Our experts partner with thousands of companies to discuss and implement different resourcing mixes, combining full-time, fractional, and agency talent to build high-performing, scalable teams.

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Learn how to build a modern marketing team using a resourcing strategy structured with a hybrid of full-time employees, agencies, and freelance marketers. Watch the Right Side Up webinar for more on this topic.

Building a modern marketing team? It’s no easy feat, especially in challenging economic environments. Between rapidly changing business needs and the seemingly never-ending emergence of new technology, channels, and trends, it’s crucial to have a marketing team structure that evolves as your needs and the landscape around you change.

You might already know where you need to optimize performance to hit your growth goals, but deciding who you need to get the work done is often tricky when building a marketing team.

It’s why the fastest-growing brands establish a resourcing strategy that’s diverse and flexible. As a brand advances through stages of growth and addresses external challenges, it’ll depend on a mixture of full-time employees (FTEs), agencies, and freelance marketers (or growth marketing consultants).

Resourcing strategies aren’t identical for every marketing team, though. Full-time employees, agencies, and freelance marketers all have advantages and disadvantages. In addition, budget considerations must be kept in mind, and different stages of growth call for different structures.

Let’s take a closer look at resourcing strategy and how to build a modern marketing team comprised of full-time employees, agencies, and freelance marketers.

What is a Resourcing Strategy?

A resourcing strategy is a comprehensive approach to hiring and utilizing talent to achieve strategic objectives.

Brands need a resourcing strategy for their marketing teams to ensure the right people with the right skills carry out activities that drive growth for the entire business. A marketing team without a well-defined resourcing strategy may lack much-needed expertise in underperforming areas or fall short of hitting growth goals due to existing team members feeling overwhelmed.

Resourcing strategies provide agility, too, by allowing brands to adapt to changing circumstances—both internally and externally.

Whether scaling up with full-time employees during rapid growth, leveraging freelance marketers for specialized projects, or partnering with agencies during economic uncertainty to maintain essential functions, a well-defined strategy ensures an optimal talent mix for any situation.

Hiring Full-Time Employees: Advantages & Disadvantages

Marketing is an umbrella for a variety of functions within an organization. Teams large and small tackle everything from demand generation to content creation and emails to events and web design—and that’s only scratching the surface.

It’s safe to say modern marketing teams are responsible for a lot, and the standard hire to fulfill all of marketing’s responsibilities has been full-time employees.

Here are the advantages of hiring a full-time employee:

• Commitment: Full-time employees are dedicated to their work and the people around them, which fosters a positive work environment and motivates other employees.
• Long-Term Investment: As a full-time employee, your marketing team deals with less turnover than external resources that might be interchanged several times throughout the year or annually. Full-time employees can also grow into new roles to meet business needs over time.
• Deep Integration: Full-time employees require little to no handholding once onboarded, and they act cross-functionally across the organization to complete tasks and advance projects efficiently.

Here are the disadvantages of hiring a full-time employee:

• Lag Business Requirements: High-growth brands often need new skills, seniority, and capacity rapidly to take up opportunities, and full-time employees require time to develop.
• Hiring & Onboarding Time: Great talent is hard to recruit and retain. Hiring the right full-time employee might take much longer than expected, which prevents the marketing team from working toward its goals until all seats are filled. Once onboarded, it takes more time to learn the business and its industry if unfamiliar.
• Costly: If the wrong full-time employee hire is made or staffing levels are incorrectly projected, there’s a massive financial, social, and cultural cost that impacts the marketing team and the entire company. Full-time employees can be a financial risk, and potential turnover threatens company culture.

Full-time employees represent a significant investment in a brand’s future. Still, it’s crucial to weigh the benefits of dedication and longevity against the potential challenges, such as costs and misaligned skills.

Should I hire a full-time employee?

Hiring a full-time employee requires a high commitment at a steep cost to find the right talent, but it’s a good choice if you’re seeking a long-term solution.

Once the employee is onboarded and up to speed, they’re a reliable asset for the company while continuing to improve their areas of expertise, which benefits the company’s growth.

You should hire a full-time employee to build out core competencies essential to the business, fill highly cross-functional roles, and bring in senior-level leadership, such as a vice president (VP) or chief marketing officer (CMO), for the long term.

Remember that excellence requires focus. If your scope for a full-time employee is too broad, you’ll likely miss out on hiring talent with the knowledge and experience you need.

Hiring Agencies: Advantages & Disadvantages

With a specific project—like a content audit—in mind, it’s worth considering an agency as part of a resourcing strategy. Agencies are prepared to jump in and apply their tried and true playbooks and processes to move efficiently. Brands also choose an agency when they’re not seeking to hire a full-time employee but still need to execute specific functions regularly, such as running advertisements on LinkedIn.

Here are the advantages of hiring an agency:

• Specialized Expertise: Agencies bring highly specialized skills across marketing disciplines, allowing a brand to quickly tap into expert knowledge.
• Scalability: Agencies scale efforts up or down based on your needs, making them a flexible option for rapidly growing brands.
• Speed to Market: Agencies execute campaigns with significant speed and precision, getting to market quicker than many marketing teams can.

Here are the disadvantages of hiring an agency:

• High Costs: Agencies can be expensive, particularly those that charge based on a percentage of media spend, which adds up quickly
• Limited Integration: Agencies typically operate externally and may not fully align with company culture or long-term strategy, leading to potential conflict.
• Inflexibility: While agencies have playbooks and processes, they can be rigid, applying a one-size-fits-all approach that may not suit a brand’s specific needs or goals.

Agencies offer a valuable solution for brands seeking specializations and rapid execution, but the higher costs and limited integration could be a barrier against those benefits. Assessing your needs, budget, and long-term goals is essential to understand whether an agency fits your marketing challenges.

Should I hire an agency?

Projects requiring many individuals to execute against a shared objective—such as a rebrand or website redesign—are perfect for agencies. You may lack the internal capacity to oversee and track progress across multiple stakeholders regularly, and an agency is equipped with the resources to stay on top of milestones.

You should also consider hiring an agency if you’re seeking a pre-packaged result and don’t have time for missteps or much trial and error.

However, if you hire an agency, don’t forget that you’ll still need at least one internal team member to be the point person staying on top of the agency. You should interview the agency’s team members before they’re assigned to your account, ensuring everyone is aligned on the project's expectations and objectives. You’re typically in it for the long haul with an agency, so you want to maintain strategy and build rapport to achieve success together.

Hiring Freelance Marketers: Advantages & Disadvantages

Flexible, remote work is far from a nascent concept. It’s existed for decades, but the global pandemic simply supercharged it. Professionals are using this as an opportunity to leave their full-time jobs and embrace freelance work instead.

Brands—whether business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B)—have taken advantage of this rise in freelance work, too. It’s easier (and cost-effective) to hire freelance marketers and growth marketing consultants for specific projects or purposes without a drawn-out hiring process or long-term investment.

Here are the advantages of hiring a freelance marketer:

• Flexibility: Freelance marketers and growth marketing consultants offer the flexibility to scale their hours up or down based on your needs. It allows brands to adjust quickly without long-term commitments.
• Specialized Expertise: As highly experienced subject matter experts, they know the intricacies of specific areas such as affiliate marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and ecommerce marketplaces.
• Fresh Perspective: Freelance marketers and growth marketing consultants provide an unbiased, fresh perspective on your marketing efforts, offering new ideas and approaches that in-house teams may overlook.

Here are the disadvantages of hiring a freelance marketer:

• Less Commitment: Focusing on short-term projects or specific tasks, they may be less committed to an organization’s long-term goals.
• Harder to Integrate: Because freelance marketers and growth marketing consultants are not full-time employees, integrating them into company culture and ensuring they’re aligned with the marketing team can be challenging.
• Finding a Fit: Hiring a freelance marketer or growth marketing consultant for more senior or cross-functional roles is difficult.

While the gig economy continues to evolve, finding the right balance between freelance marketers and other options for a resourcing strategy is critical to fuel growth.

Should I hire a freelance marketer?

As growth accelerates or economic conditions change, a brand can scale the number of freelance marketers and growth consultants it’s working with—and, more importantly, their hours. It allows you to transition talent in and out of the company as often as necessary. If you’re in a period of high growth, hiring freelance marketers is attractive because they’re experts in specific areas and come at a lesser cost than full-time employees.

But it may feel tricky to fully integrate a freelance marketer or growth marketing consultant with your internal marketing team. You’ll want to invest the time to provide organizational context to a freelance marketer and treat them as a partner rather than a vendor.

Above all else, welcome their contrarian perspectives while giving honest feedback. Freelance marketers and growth marketing consultants will likely identify blind spots, and you want to empower them to turn these into growth opportunities.

Build a Modern Marketing Team with Right Side Up

Embracing a dynamic and adaptable resourcing strategy makes for an effective marketing team. By carefully considering the advantages and disadvantages of full-time employees, agencies, and freelance marketers, you’re prepared to build a modern marketing team that’s agile, skilled, and ready to tackle challenges.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to resourcing strategies, so strike the right balance and ensure your marketing team has the expertise and flexibility to succeed and drive growth.

‍Get in touch with Right Side Up—we’ll walk you through the resourcing strategy needed for your brand to build a best-in-class marketing organization.