Your Marketing Team Doesn’t Need Another Agency. It Needs More Creative Capacity.

There’s a point in the growth of almost every tech company where the marketing team starts running out of hands.

Not ideas. Hands.

The team knows what needs to happen. There’s a product launch coming up, a customer story that would be great to turn into a video, a website that needs new content, a sales team asking for better assets, a founder who wants to be more visible on LinkedIn, and another campaign that somehow needs to go live next month.

The problem is that all of these things end up sitting with the same four or five people.

We see this a lot when we talk to marketing teams at tech companies. They’re not looking for someone to come in and tell them that video is important. They already know. They’re usually trying to figure out how to actually produce everything they want to produce without making the team even more stretched.

That’s a very different problem.

The content backlog is usually a capacity problem

Marketing teams have changed a lot over the last few years. They’re expected to create more content, across more channels, for more stages of the buying journey. At the same time, the teams themselves aren’t necessarily getting bigger.

A marketing manager might be responsible for campaigns, product marketing, events, social, website content, internal communications and everything in between. Add video production to that list and it quickly becomes another project that someone has to somehow find time for.

So the product video gets pushed back.

The customer story stays on the to-do list for another quarter.

The founder content happens when someone has a free afternoon.

And the marketing team keeps moving from one priority to the next without ever quite having enough capacity to do all of them properly.

We don't think the answer is necessarily to produce more ideas. Most teams already have enough.

The question is how to turn those ideas into finished work.

Hiring isn't always the obvious answer

When a team reaches this point, hiring seems like the logical next step.

And sometimes it is.

But creative production is rarely one skill.

You might need someone who understands video production for one project, a designer for another, an editor for social content, a copywriter for a campaign and a creative director to make sure everything actually hangs together.

Hiring one person doesn't suddenly give you all of those capabilities.

It also means recruitment, onboarding, salary, management and another permanent role to keep busy. And the amount of work isn't necessarily consistent. You might need a lot of production around a product launch and much less a month later.

For a lot of growing companies, what they actually need isn't another permanent person.

They need access to more people when they need them.

That's where an external creative team can make sense.

The right production process should make things easier, not harder

There’s also a difference between outsourcing a project and actually adding creative capacity to your team.

Good production needs a process. We need to understand the brief, get into the product, align on the idea, develop the concept, go through feedback and revisions, and make sure everyone involved knows what’s happening and when. There’s no shortcut around that if you want to make good work.

The difference is how much of that process the marketing team has to carry themselves.

When we start a project, we take responsibility for moving it forward. We run the discovery, structure the production, bring the right people in, manage the creative development, handle the shoot and post-production, and keep the project moving through the different rounds of feedback.

The marketing team is still involved — and they should be. They know the company, the audience and the priorities better than anyone. But they shouldn't have to become video producers just to get a video made.

That’s what we mean by adding creative capacity.

You still have a process. You just don't have to carry the whole process yourself.

One production should do more than one job

This is something we think about quite a lot when planning video projects.

A company might come to us because they need a product video. But if we're already getting the team, the product and the people in the room, why stop there?

The same production could give them a main product video, several short LinkedIn clips, founder content, sales assets, website content and material for a campaign.

A customer interview could become a customer story, short social clips, sales content and quotes for the website.

A two-hour shoot doesn't have to result in one two-minute video.

It can become a month of content.

That changes the economics of video production, but more importantly, it changes how useful the production is to the marketing team.

The goal isn't to make more content for the sake of having more content. It's to make the production work harder.

This is where we think an external creative team is useful

We're not interested in becoming another company that sends a deck full of creative ideas and waits for the marketing team to figure out how to execute them.

Our role at WEARE is much closer to being an extra creative team for tech companies.

We work with marketing teams that already have a strategy, a product and a lot of things they want to communicate, but don't always have enough people to turn all of that into content.

Our focus is video production for tech companies — product videos, explainers, customer stories, founder content, brand films, event content and the other pieces of video that marketing teams need throughout the year.

We bring the creative direction, production and execution around that work, while the internal team stays focused on the bigger marketing picture.

That's particularly useful for smaller marketing teams. Instead of hiring a video producer, editor, designer and creative director because you occasionally need all four, you can bring in a team that already has those capabilities.

And when you don't need us, you don't need to keep a whole team on the payroll.

The best external creative team should feel like part of your team

That's probably the biggest thing we've learned.

The relationship works best when we don't feel like an external supplier.

We need to understand what the company is trying to achieve, who they're talking to and why the content matters. We need to understand the product well enough to explain it without turning it into a 20-minute product demo. And we need to understand where the final content is actually going to be used.

Because a video that looks great but doesn't help the marketing team do anything isn't particularly useful.

For us, the production is only part of the job. The other part is making sure what we produce has a life beyond the project itself.

A product video should help someone understand the product.

A customer story should give sales something credible to send to a prospect.

A founder video should be usable across social rather than disappear into a website.

And a shoot should ideally give the marketing team enough material to keep using for weeks afterwards.

That's the kind of creative production we believe is actually valuable.

So maybe you don't need another agency

You might need a hire. You might need a freelancer. You might need an agency for a specific project.

But if the problem you're dealing with is that your marketing team has more things it wants to produce than it has people to produce them, the answer might simply be more creative capacity.

Not another strategy.

Not another person to manage.

Not another agency that needs a three-hour kickoff meeting before anything happens.

Just a team that can plug in, understand what needs to be done and get the work made.

That's what we're building at WEARE.

An external creative team for tech companies that need more capacity without building another internal department.

If that sounds like the problem you're dealing with, let's talk.