Outsourced Marketing: Get responsible results now
As a full service outsourced marketing agency we often find ourselves highlighting the benefits of outsourcing your marketing when talking with prospective clients.
We often discuss the benefits to small, medium and large organisations and we have never actually thought about getting it down…until now.
So why should you potentially outsource all or parts of your marketing at different stages of your business or product life cycle?
Free you up to focus on activities that will benefit the business most
Whether you are a business owner wearing multiple hats, a single marketing manager with no team or manage an entire department, sometimes you just don’t have enough resources.
You find yourself overworked on not focussing on the projects that are going to deliver value to realise the businesses full potential. You know what needs to be done, but you are bogged down in doing something you can clearly define.
Your skills and time are wasted by not delegating your marketing and potentially outsourcing it to an agency to lighten your load. You should be driving the marketing strategy and not be stuck in tactical delivery.
Your team or department simply don’t have all of the required knowledge/capability
We all have our strengths and areas of potential. We find that small and medium business owners often wear every hat of the business and by continuing to do the marketing themselves, they recognise that learning the skills to be proficient is simply not sustainable for the long term.
Similarly marketing managers and marketing directors have KPIs that need to be met budgets that need to be managed, however, their existing team does not have the capability to reach their goals and they simply cannot afford to hire more staff.
In these instances outsourcing some or all of the marketing function can prove to be the quickest way to get a team achieving your goals.
Agencies are driven to deliver results
Agencies, survive by constantly performing. An agency is constantly questioned about their worth to the business (much more than an employee). They are constantly reporting back to a business and their contracts can generally be terminated relatively quickly.
To simply survive in this competitive world, if briefed and managed correctly, you will most likely find that you will get a lot more value in terms of output from your outsourced marketing agency than what you would be paying for. This is a great benefit.
Many disciplines combined in one place
If you were to hire a graphic designer, brand manager, online marketing specialist, social media manager, campaign manager, marketing analyst, public relations manager and digital UX designer…you would be looking at a massive outlay.
Approaching a full service outsourced marketing agency, you can purchase all of the above in the one place and don’t need to have enough work to justify every one of those roles to the business in a part time or full time capacity.
Multi industry experience
Sometimes you just need a fresh approach. You have hired the best of the industry and you are finding that the same ideas are coming out and differentiating yourself from the competitors is becoming increasingly difficult.
Agencies generally have people working for them that have come from many different backgrounds (including non marketing backgrounds).
This ability to combine people from many different industries means that a creative approach can be taken to inherent industry or business problems (the problem of sameness).
Time is of the essence
Sometimes opportunities present themselves and you simply need to jump onto them quickly. Hiring staff can take too long, but briefing an outsourced marketing agency may simply be what you need to get your initiative off the ground quickly.
You need more than an ad agency
Advertising agencies have been around forever and specialist agencies are very limited in the scope of what they deliver and never really take complete responsibility beyond their speciality.
A marketing agency is very different. Like your in house marketing department, a outsourced marketing agency has their goals and objectives aligned with yours.
At Mind Methods we take an approach that encompasses planning, understanding your business and understanding your target audience(s). The approach is tailored to what is right for your business (and not flogging you our primary offering or speciality).
The plan is then implemented in the form of projects or campaigns and can encompass anything from setting up a customer database and website through to delivering an integrated marketing campaign or comprehensive social media strategy…there is no limit.
Finally, the results from the activity are measured and analysed to understand what the next steps are. If it is a repetitive project, such as a campaign, key learnings can used to deliver stronger results next time the campaign is run.
The cost is right for you
Ultimately we are asked, ‘what does it cost to outsource your marketing’ and the answer is that a good quality and ethical agency will work with you to deliver quality activities with a budget that you can justify with realistic goals and expectations for that budget.
Would you pay $24k per year for a Personal Assistant? well probably not as it would be too hard to find one for that price. Would you even pay $24k for a marketing assistant…no, because you couldn’t get one for that price.
However, small businesses could benefit greatly from engaging with a full service marketing agency for that amount. They could get the expertise of senior marketers who could essentially consult on their business and deliver projects that would cut out much of the inefficiency of hiring a junior marketer or getting your logo done on Fivver for $100.
That being said it is a process and the greater your budget, the more you should naturally get. The clincher is that you should essentially pay for what you can afford.
The bottom line
When engaging with an outsourced marketing agency you should always ensure that your business or department grows in capability and that fundamental systems, tools, processes and marketing assets are embedded in your marketing function to make it better (whether the agency is there for a short or long term).
Essentially your marketing agency should be like a team working on the most expensive asset that you own, your house. You undertake work on your house to either improve your lifestyle or to appreciate the value of your asset. You always work within your budget and ensure that at least one of the two goals are met.
Engaging an outsourced marketing agency is very much the same, value goes beyond leads being delivered (a cheap overseas call centre can do that for you), value can include improved client retention, reduction in the sales cycle, increased cohesiveness between sales and marketing, improving brand awareness to new or existing markets, finding new ways to communicate, improving channel communications, better highlighting product benefits, educating you on the marketing function for your business … the list goes on.
