Tequila in London is running dry

Yesterday I read an letter in Marketing Week (the old fashioned paper version), from Simon McMaster, the Director of Digital at Tequila/London, the marketing agency, moaning about the spiraling salaries in his sector.  His real gripe is that e-marketeers / online marketeers are demanding too much money for permanent salaries, and that they are all going freelance, and therefore costing him alot more money. He says that this is driving up client costs as their costs increase accordingly, and that it is time to keep online marketing salaries from getting out of control. Get real, this just won't happen - your industry is telling us this !!

We have the classic economic supply and demand equation - low supply+ high demand = high fees.

While I appreciate that this may well be a real nuisance, it is a pure example of recruitment supply and demand taking over. They may well be an acute shortage of digital staff in the industry, of which I have no doubt, but to a certain degree the industry is now paying for the transient nature of the marketing sector. Over the last number of years, instead of recruiting new talent, they always wanted the experienced marketeers, and would poach them from their competition. The fact is they were just not interested in marketing people that didn't have a good track record - it was a real chicken and egg situation for young marketing people. Over time as these skills have moved up and out into the freelance space there has not been a backfill happening quickly enough to meet the demand.

This is not something that is going to change overnight, it takes companies with foresight to invest in talent long term. Then you have the battle to keep them interested to retain them. Finally you have to pay them the right level of remuneration to keep them happy. Now that might be higher that you want to pay, given the market conditions, but what's the alternative? lose your staff or worse, lose your key clients?

So If you can't recruit the right calibre of permanent online marketing staff, then you have  5 choices:

1. Turn the work away because you can't deliver - won't ever happen will it?
2. Hire the freelance online marketeers and charge you client a higher margin to cover your extra cost
3. Hire the freelance online marketeers, take the hit on the cost and make less margin. Less margin but a happy client - which is what you want isn't it?
4. Take a look at your medium to long term recruitment policy and invest in your future marketeers now.
5. Look at your existing retention strategies and look at other ways of keeping your existing talented online marketeers, before your competition gets them first.

If all else fails give up the PAYE and go freelancing yourself!!!