Is Your In-House Marketing Budget Cannibalizing Your Media Spend?

We recently completed a project for a healthcare client who wanted to bring most of their marketing in-house. Before engaging with us, they were recruiting for in-house roles with salaries totaling 33% of overall budget, but most of these were senior executive positions, leaving few hands-on roles for creative work. This meant they’d still need agencies for campaign creative, media buying, PR, and more, while new competitors were outspending them in media by 2:1.

It was clear they needed a more effective model.

Leveraging our decades of agency operational experience, we helped this client achieve better results by focusing on strategic improvements to optimize their budget:

1. Planning, Process, Performance: We invested in key specialist hires for the organization to boost efficiency and growth. We also created a custom dashboard to track marketing KPIs and systematized the use of a monthly marketing scorecard to keep the C-Suite informed of progress, and help the internal marketing team optimize results.

2. Leveraging Specialist Networks: We assessed their agency engagement model and contracted and outsourced work to our network of top-notch freelancers with big brand experience, achieving better results at a lower cost than a single agency partnership.

3. Streamlining Workflow and Tools: We saved costs with efficient workflows and tools (leveraging AI where possible). We assessed all marketing collateral and campaigns, eliminated bloat, and ensured everything served the organization’s primary objectives. The savings were reinvested into media spend to expand reach.

4. Optimizing Event Spend: We evaluated potential events thoroughly, analyzing attendee demographics and potential return per attendee to determine the event's budget worthiness. We then set clear, measurable objectives aligned with broader business goals and were able to determine that half their previous event budget would be more effective when allocated to digital media spend.

Through strategic investment in workflows, tools, people, partnerships, and processes, we cut the client’s projected staffing costs in half. The new budget was concentrated on a few strategic executive roles, supported by hands-on in-house team members using AI-enabled tools and strategic outsourced partnerships to optimize output.

By following this approach, their budget now looks very different—allowing for a much higher media spend, which is crucial to maintaining market share amidst increased competition.

Initial Budget:
Staffing: $6,000,000
Agency Fees: $4,000,000
Events: $20,000,000
Media: $10,000,000

Optimized Budget:
Staffing: $3,000,000
Outsourced Fees: $2,000,000
Events: $10,000,000
Media: $25,000,000

If you’re interested in learning more, drop me a line. I love nothing more than sharing what we’ve learned as we’ve helped our clients through this fascinating process.