You’ve spent the last decade – or almost – perfecting the craft of digital performance marketing. You’ve taught Marketing Specialists the ropes of campaign creation, optimization levers, and performance metrics. You can design and run A|B tests in your sleep, and string together the story of “why” and “what’s next” to your C-suite compellingly. You’ve weathered waves of platform changes and survived with your ROAS intact.
But now the job title that defines where you’re at in your mastery of marketing is disappearing from LinkedIn listings. With AI and agency outsourcing trends reshaping marketing org charts, job requisitions for Group Marketing Managers have all but vanished.
I’ve been there. Mentally, I still am there. And I’m sharing my thoughts and views from my days in the trenches, practicing digital marketing since 2015 until my retirement from a full-time tech career a month ago.
Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash
Agency Outsourcing: Why It’s Good For Your Company (And For You)
To be ruthlessly honest, not having formal direct reports wasn’t great for my ego. I was brought up in an era and a culture where the size of one’s team was perceived as a measure of one’s expertise. But even with the growth of dual career tracks in enterprise-size companies, the Manager – Group Marketing Manager – Director route remained a tried-and-true way to grow in Marketing until a year or two ago.
Not having a team of direct reports didn’t mean my job got simpler. In fact, after I moved from a Group Marketing Manager role at one employer to a Lead-level IC role at another, I found myself dealing with more complex and varied problems involving a wider variety of stakeholders. Because I straddled multiple lines of business and operated across disciplines at times, I sometimes found myself responsible for optimizing the fractional time of twice as many people as I had ever managed full-time.
As more companies turn to agencies instead of building large in-house teams, I’m sure I wasn’t the only marketer whose direct reporting team got smaller over time. And to be honest, I found that partnering an agency freed me up to spend more of my time thinking about solving business problems, rather than devoting large amounts of time to safeguarding business continuity.
The Marketing Specialist role has high turnover by nature: it’s a starting point where new marketers learn the ropes and quickly move on to bigger opportunities. Not many companies are big enough to justify having redundancy on channel specialist headcount, which means that whenever a Specialist leaves, you’ll be covering work while hiring, then onboarding the new incoming hire.
What does that translate into? For up to three months at a time, you could be splitting your time across two jobs: your own and that of whichever vacancy you’re covering. Don’t you think not having to do that is a sanity saver?
Even With An Agency, Your Company Needs You
While going from having people rolling up to you in the org chart to having that layer outsourced to an agency may make you feel demoted, the reality is that you aren’t. Your role isn’t to out-execute the agency; it’s to give them the business context that shapes the way they work.
That isn’t a job for a Marketing Specialist; in fact, it might call for a deeper level of business understanding than you had in your first years as a manager. Most likely, the agency team you’re collaborating with will include a mix of more senior and newer team members, which means you’ll get to co-strategize with them at a more sophisticated level than you used to with an in-house team of new specialists.
Agencies provide the cross-pollination of having optimized a channel for many more businesses than a single marketer growing entirely through in-house roles might. But they won’t have the bandwidth to understand your company’s business model and data the way you would. An agency model isn’t about you or the agency; it’s about you and the agency to provide the combination of breadth and depth that will ensure there is multi-dimensional senior-level thinking on the challenges that come your way.
In short, Group Marketing Manager job requisitions might be as dead as the dodo on LinkedIn (at least for now), but the need for Group Marketing Manager-level expertise is not. Perhaps our resumes might have fewer title rungs. But if we reframe what we’ve achieved in the form of strategic impact rather than raw team size, there’s still a path to keep growing intellectually and professionally.
That’s my take on how the agency model is changing the way we work at the Group Marketing Manager level for 7+ year veterans in our field. In my next instalment, I’m going to talk about why I think agencies are the right place for early career marketers in the current digital performance marketing space. Stay tuned for Part 2!