by Alistair Reid, Partnerships & Marketing Director at Cubaka
Everywhere you go now in our industry, you almost can’t escape a conversation about dwindling budgets. Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey found that 59% of CMOs felt they had insufficient budget to execute their strategy, while 39% planned to cut agency budgets. That pressure is forcing brands to look more closely at how they work with agencies and where their money is going.
A modular marketing approach gives brands flexibility in how they divide work between internal teams and external support. An agency might develop a social plan and produce some content, while briefing in-house teams to deliver other elements. That balance can change as priorities shift.
Someone needs to take responsibility for making those parts work together, including deciding what work should happen. Large organisations can have plenty of talent and ideas, yet struggle to turn them into effective content because of how the work is organised. Adding specialists can leave a stretched team with even more people to manage.
Agencies can pull in different directions too. An idea developed for one brief might never reach colleagues who could use it elsewhere in the business.
Taking more work in-house can bring similar challenges. People know their part of the business well, but may have little visibility of what colleagues elsewhere are doing. Good ideas can struggle to get a hearing when the team is busy dealing with whatever has landed in its inbox.
Deciding what deserves attention
In global businesses, a central marketing team might be responding to stakeholders around the world, each with something they think needs to go online right now. With so many requests coming in, it can be hard to step back and consider how the content fits its strategic objectives.
I think that’s often where in-house teams need support. Someone has to judge which requests deserve attention and be prepared to suggest a better approach. A stakeholder might ask for a post about a service, when a useful explanation of the customer problem it solves would give people more reason to read it. That takes an understanding of the audience, as well as the confidence to challenge a brief.
The brand still needs to own its overall business objectives. An agency can help translate those into a content programme, proposing ideas and deciding where the expertise within the business could make them stronger. Some ideas will travel well across markets; others depend on local knowledge. Those judgements shape what gets made and how the budget is used.
That involvement needs to continue through production. A promising idea can lose its point as different teams contribute and feedback comes in. Creative direction helps protect what made it worth doing, while clear ownership and agreed approvals give it a route to publication.
The modular element is the flexibility in who does what. An agency could produce content itself during a busy period, or brief internal teams whose knowledge would make the work more useful. The balance can change while the same partner remains involved in shaping the programme and getting it delivered.
Making it work across multiple brands
I recently spoke to someone at a company that owns 20-odd regional estate agencies, all with different branding and names. Its central marketing team handles social media and email for all of them, and they’re having an absolute mare trying to organise it all. Each has its own audience and local resource constraints.
For them, the starting point would be understanding what the content needs to achieve for each business. If several branches want to attract more sellers, their separate requests might become a shared series answering questions homeowners ask before putting a property on the market. An agency could develop that idea with people across the group, drawing on the conversations they are already having with customers.
There would still be decisions about what could be shared and what needed a local approach. Advice on preparing a home for sale might be useful across several brands, while a piece about buyer demand would need input from people who know that area. A local agent’s experience could give the content something a central team would struggle to write from a distance.
Those decisions would shape the monthly plan. An agency could produce shared material and work with local teams to turn their knowledge into useful content. The same thinking could carry through to email and the website, adapting the work to each channel. Responsibility for delivery would stay clear even as the split of work varied between branches.
With budgets under pressure, brands need to make better use of the ideas and expertise already in the business. Modular marketing can give them a partner who helps decide where that effort should go and stays involved through publication. That should mean better content reaching audiences consistently, with good ideas getting the support they deserve.
