Building a Hub-and-Spoke Marketing Team

Standing up a full-time marketing team may be one of the most underestimated milestones in the journey of any organization. Because marketing isn’t typically deemed “mission-critical”, it’s usually the first to take a hit during cut-backs and the last to receive funding when things are going well. This cycle of “one step forward, two steps back” means that even marketing leaders with a significant war chest prefer to keep their teams flexible and avoid overcommitting resources before they have to.

Practically speaking, it would also be tough to compete in today’s communications ecosystem without the type of expertise that a full-stack marketing department affords. As a marketing leader, you need the ability to move seamlessly across channels, growing awareness, driving engagement, and building critical mass in all the places your audience now spends time. For resource-constrained organizations, a “hub-and-spoke” marketing team is often the next best thing. In this post, we’re exploring what hub-and-spoke teams are, why they’re needed, and how to make the approach work for you.

How Hub-and-Spoke Works

High-functioning enterprise marketing departments are something to behold. These, typically integrated, machines blend multiple layers of strategic, creative, technical, and operations expertise to deliver omnichannel messaging at scale. That includes the type of multi-modal storytelling you’ll need to drive engagement across each of the various touchpoints in your user journey. As the leader of a growing organization, you need to compete at this level, but may not have the resources, bandwidth, or risk tolerance to do so.

One of the more common solutions for bridging this gap – especially for marketing leaders that need to do “more with less” or are ramping up for a period of accelerated growth – is a “hub-and-spoke” team. In this scenario, you (the hub) oversee a group of internal and external subject matter experts (the spokes) to implement and scale your marketing strategy. The goal of this approach is to aggregate the same level of expertise as a fully internal marketing department without committing the same volume of resources.

“Remember that hub-and-spoke teams tend to develop compounding entropy the bigger they get.”

Hub-and spoke teams attempt to split the difference, pairing an in-house marketing leader with multiple third-party service providers. What these teams gain in flexibility, they often lose in efficiency, though. To understand why, think of any high-functioning marketing team like a machine. Now imagine disassembling that machine and rebuilding it with similar parts from five other manufacturers. While it’s technically possible, it’s not optimal and is probably going to generate significant friction without a lot of alterations and the hand of a skilled machinist to make it all work together.

That’s because hub-and-spoke teams tend to develop compounding entropy the bigger they get. For instance, small organizations frequently rely on a one or two person team with little or no hierarchy; what these teams lack in output, they often make up for in budget. On the other hand, enterprise organizations blend multiple layers of strategic, creative, and technical resources across multiple channel-based teams; what they lack in budget, they often make up for in quality. While significant, their true delta usually isn’t the volume of resources; it’s the glue that holds them all together.

Organizing Your Team

With those factors in mind, it’s time to start building. Your team’s makeup – including in-house workers, independent contractors, and agencies – will/should evolve throughout your organizational journey. Likewise, your team’s makeup won’t be completely unique, but it should be shaped around your unique marketing strategy – not some out-of-the-box marketing toolkit. Media, public relations, PPC, et al. For instance, if SEO is relevant enough to your growth and you have the budget, don’t be afraid to invest in a full-time in-house resource and bring in a contractor or agency partner for social et al.

Once your team is assembled, the most critical task will be to get all of your stakeholders speaking a common language. That includes defining the methods of communication, project management SOPs, editing tools, as well as workflow items like how new tasks are assigned, passed from team to team, and marked complete. Remember, when building a hub-and-spoke marketing team, your role isn’t as much about accumulating expertise as it is about establishing making everything work together.

The collaborative framework for any given team will vary widely by the type and size of your organization as well as your relationship with each of the respective vendors you’re working with. An Agile project management strategy can be effective here, but any strategy should include the following components.

• Regular scrum and sprint meetings with all stakeholders force conversations that won’t likely occur naturally in the course of any given day’s work given the separation between various stakeholders.
• Post mortem meetings that include a review of each project’s progress from start to finish. These should include an analysis of the project’s organizational impact as well as an analysis of potential operational improvements.

Be sure to communicate your collaborative needs before entering into an agreement with a contractor or agency. After-the-fact changes in the amount of time your project consumes will likely cause tension. Additionally, remember that the degree of leverage you have to dictate the terms of that collaborative approach will be directly attributable to how much work you’re giving out.

Getting Moving

Once you’re off and running, there’s a couple of important things to keep in mind as you move forward. The first is to be aware that while healthy competition between vendors in an RFP process can be a good thing; within a team, it can become caustic. A common phenomenon with hub-and-spoke collaborations is vendors providing you with strategic support that favors their services. This may seem obvious in retrospect, but marketing leaders should maintain some distance from vendors in the early stages of their process or work with a single integrated marketing agency.

Hub-and-spoke strategies can be a powerful way to slim down your budget, but you’ll need to account for some loss of scale in the process. Getting it right is a balancing act between how much you need to reach audiences and how much you need to reach the right audience. At an absolute minimum, you should plan for about three to five times the marketing leader’s salary. At first glance, that may seem no better than hiring two, three, or four more people. In reality, hiring employees will increase the depth of your marketing program when your goal in this phase is to increase the breadth.

Finally, one of the most important and oft-missed aspects of a hub-and-spoke strategy is the data storytelling strategy. You need a way to showcase how your efforts are moving the bottom line, but even on a good day, bringing dozens of different sources from multiple partners into a single report can be challenging. While big-box tools like PowerBI or Tableau are fun to play with, beware that managing them requires a dedicated resource. Tools like Klipfolio, Databox, etc. may be a better solution in the early stages of growth and will allow you to aggregate much of the same types of source data, including those created manually, into dashboards.

Integrated Marketing Partners

If you don’t have the bandwidth to manage the kaleidoscope of players needed for a successful hub-and-spoke team, you might find a full-service or integrated marketing agency offers a more manageable solution. These teams typically deliver the breadth of services you need within their own collaborative framework and the ability to go deeper when the need arises. That includes all of the strategy, marketing, operations, and project management functions you’ll need to deliver seamless communications at smaller scales.

Your role as facilitator will be significantly expanded here as you keep track of all the moving pieces and ensure that all teams are working together towards a common goal.