Downsizing, layoffs, unemployment, and lower-than-expected earnings are becoming repetitive terms on the six o'clock news. But all this doom and gloom should just remind you that your company better get sales up—and fast! And since marketing drives sales, the marketing department is where businesses should focus their efforts and resources.

Unfortunately, marketing departments are often one of the first to feel the impact of lean times, yet they are still expected to perform and yield the same or even better results. If you don't have strong and successful marketing initiatives, your competition will. The last thing you need is your customers going to a competitor and your sales dropping off. With so many marketing departments now operating with a skeleton staff and an equally bare bones budget, there's a scramble to find a workable solution.

When your marketing department has a staff of ten doing the work of fifteen, deadlines get pushed back, new campaign ideas get dropped, and tensions rise when there aren't enough hands and minds to do the work. Budgets can't be stretched to add on new employees, yet you still need to get top-quality work done—your CEO isn't going to accept the excuse that you didn't have enough money or enough help. You are still expected to perform like you always have-despite your challenges. So how can you continue to deliver timely, effective marketing campaigns while controlling costs?

Traditionally, to get more work done, companies picked one of two solutions. The first, hiring more staff, is simply not an option for many companies right now—especially if they've had to lay off marketing employees recently. The second option is hiring an ad agency to create and execute campaigns. This is often an effective, though very expensive, proposition. While top ad agencies strengths are in their strategic vision and creative skills, they are not always necessary (or cost effective) to use in the execution phase.

A third option is to use experienced marketers on a contract basis for any or every phase of a program launch. Your costs are controlled and so is your overhead. The final product will look the same whether you have XYZ Advertising Agency doing all the work or a combination of your core staff and experienced marketers on a contract basis launching your marketing campaign. You'll get a better ROI on your efforts.

Hiring marketing contractors is a flexible, cost-effective and creative solution. You don't even have to necessarily have desk space available for them--you can decide whether you want contractors in-house or working from a remote location. Contracted marketing specialists can help with: online marketing, analytics, interactive marketing, project management, direct marketing, events, graphic design, market research, or just about anything else you need. Bringing on contracted marketing professionals will help you ramp up your organization into a full complement of marketing professionals for whatever length of time you need while keeping your expenses in check.

Putting contracted staffers to work for you reduces management, human resources, and employment cost issues. You outsource that headache to the staffing company! By keeping your core marketing staff in place, you can bring in a complement of other marketing professionals to help you when your staff gets overloaded or new projects come in—without the overhead and commitment of another full-time employee. Even if a new project gets dropped on your lap unexpectedly, a good marketing staffing company can find qualified professionals on short notice.

In today's global marketplace and troubled economy, companies have to find creative solutions to getting the same (or better) marketing results with a smaller budget and fewer staff. The bottom line is that no matter what the economic challenges, you can't skimp on the talent of your staff or the effectiveness of your campaigns. And when you simply can't justify adding another employee to your payroll or shell out a small fortune to an ad agency to outsource the work, contracted marketing professionals will deliver an impressive ROI.