When (and Why) to Bring in Outside Marketing Help

In “Marketing vs. the World,” we explored a common challenge: marketing departments and their leaders frequently find themselves playing defense against skepticism from sales, finance, and even members of the C-suite. We mentioned that bringing in outside marketing partners can often reset these sometimes tense dynamics.

The marketing team that’s constantly justifying its existence—or fighting to keep its budget—rarely does its best work, and this scenario plays out in companies of all sizes. When internal bridges are burning, an external perspective often provides the objectivity needed to rebuild communication and trust.

We’ve seen organizations where marketing ideas were routinely dismissed when presented by the internal team, only to be embraced when the same concepts come from an outside partner. Is this fair? Not really. But it’s a daily reality for many marketing leaders. Understanding how to strategically use external partners can mean the difference between perpetual frustration and meaningful progress.

A Fresh Perspective

Internal marketing teams can become victims of their own environment. When you’re embedded in company culture, it’s easy to adopt the same assumptions and blind spots as the rest of the organization. External partners bring fresh eyes and a broader perspective that’s unburdened by “the way we’ve always done it.”

A skilled marketing partner asks questions that haven’t been considered, challenges sacred cows, and offers solutions from their diverse experiences helping clients in many other industries. An outsider’s view can be invaluable when your marketing initiatives have stalled or when you need to break through internal resistance to new ideas.

On-Demand, Specialized Expertise

From search engine optimization and video production to content creation and nuanced UX design, the ecosystem of digital marketing requires a widening range of increasingly specialized skills. Few in-house marketing teams can realistically maintain expertise across every specialty. A videographer who provides his own voiceover work and writes your SEO-optimized blog posts and presents a social media strategy epitomizes the “jack of all trades, master of none.”

An external marketing partner grants you access to expertise across multiple areas exactly when you need it, without carrying the overhead of specialized staff year-round.

Video creation requires different expertise than WordPress development. With an external marketing partner like Rare Bird, you get both whenever you need them. Four months later, when your priorities shift to creating sales funnel content or designing new print materials, you’re not stuck with specialized employees whose skills no longer match what you need.

Value and Predictable Flexibility

This is where a monthly retainer arrangement with an agency becomes a marketing manager’s secret weapon. Your costs stay fixed month-to-month, even as your marketing needs evolve. For roughly the cost of a full-time employee’s salary each month, you gain access to an entire team of specialists—designers, copywriters, developers, video producers, strategists, and more. That same budget, directed toward an external partner, can provide you access to 5-10 different specialists throughout the year, all managed and coordinated for you, which effectively turns fixed costs into variable resources. And you know your colleagues in finance love budget predictability. If your company’s executive leadership is concerned about headcount and fixed costs, hiring an agency like Rare Bird is the perfect solution.

Where External Partners Shine: Real-World Scenarios

Scenario 1: You Need Professional Video Work
Your social posts and website feature a lot of stock photography, and your DIY videos still look amateurish, despite your best efforts. Meanwhile, your competitors are sharing polished video content that generates serious engagement. An external marketing partner brings in a videographer who understands lighting, sound, and editing, turning your basic talking points into compelling visual stories. Instead of hiring a full-time videographer (plus purchasing a whole truckload of equipment), you access professional-grade production only when it’s needed, whether it’s for weekly social posts, monthly product demos, or quarterly customer testimonials.

Scenario 2: Your Written Content Is Lacking
An external partner can provide a writer with wide-ranging knowledge and experience across industries who can interview your subject matter experts before spinning complex information into engaging, authoritative content—blog posts, pillar pages, white papers, case studies, ebooks, or solution briefs—that positions your company as a genuine leader in your sector. You thought AI might get the job done, but it’s only as good as the writers and editors behind the prompts. Even the best AI tools require skilled human oversight to avoid producing generic content. Professional writers bring context, nuance, and a genuine curiosity about your business that no automated system can replicate. We know how to extract valuable insights from your subject matter experts, challenge assumptions when necessary, and craft narratives that engage real human readers.

Scenario 3: Analytics Makes Your Head Hurt
Online traffic isn’t growing despite your marketing efforts, and you suspect your SEO approach is outdated. You’re still not clear about the details of GA4, to be honest, and you’re not confident you’re tracking the right metrics. “Are these numbers accurate?” you have said more than once. An outside marketing partner can conduct a technical SEO audit, identify hidden issues within your site structure, and rebuild your analytics implementation to track meaningful metrics.

Scenario 4: You Need Fresh Creative Thinking
Your creatives do solid work, but a new product line needs something extra—a distinct visual identity that still feels connected to your established brand. This product line might one day take your company in a new direction, so you want to get it right. You turn to an agency your VP worked with in a different role, years ago, and ask their experts to whip up multiple concepts and new possibilities that your internal team could never have developed on its own.

Scenario 5: You Never Get Around to That Website Redesign
You’ve been meaning to redesign your website for months, maybe years, but it never becomes your top priority. Everyone agrees the current site doesn’t represent your brand well or generate leads effectively, but other urgent projects always take precedence. Outsourcing your marketing and web development needs can break this cycle and establish a structured process that requires minimal time from your team while keeping the project moving forward. Six months later, you have a modern, effective website that would have remained in that “someday” territory without looking beyond your team for help.

Evaluating Potential Marketing Partners

Not all marketing partners deliver equal value. Here are some questions to consider asking:

Do they understand your business and industry?
Can they articulate your challenges in their own words?
Do their case studies demonstrate strategic thinking, not just execution?
How do they approach collaboration with internal teams?
What processes do they use to keep communication transparent?
Do they have clear systems for project management and accountability?
How do they handle the transition when a project concludes?
After they deliver what you need, what happens next?

The best partnerships leave your team stronger after the engagement concludes, and external partners should always be able demonstrate their value. Beyond delivering what you need—a new website, ebooks and videos, refreshed branding—the right partner can help change how marketing is perceived and valued within your organization.

And that may be the most valuable deliverable of all.

For more than two decades, we’ve helped businesses drive real results. Ready to soar?

LET’S TALK

You Might Also Like:

Subscribe to our newsletter for more practical insights about how to make the most of a marketing partnership—and a whole lot more.