A curious phenomenon is unfolding across the business landscape - one that began in startups with their signature “shoestring budgets” but has since caught the attention of larger organizations which are doing something that, even a few years ago, was unthinkable: setting sail without a marketing department.
Now, before CMOs and other marketing professionals start freaking out, the operative word in this trend is not marketing; it’s “department”. That is, businesses STILL need marketing – in fact, they need it now more than ever given how competitive and fragmented marketplaces are getting - not to mention how demanding and sophisticated customers are becoming!
Nevertheless, modern businesses don’t always need a formal in-house marketing department since most core marketing functions (including content development, distribution, and analytics) can be effectively outsourced to a firm that specializes in both inbound and conventional (print/offline/event, etc.) marketing.
3 Reasons Businesses Today are Outsourcing Their Marketing
Below, we highlight the 3 key advantages of this approach that are turning a phenomenon into a trend, and perhaps eventually, into the norm:
1. Dramatic Cost Savings
An in-house marketing department - and all of its related labor costs and overhead - must be paid for, regardless of whether campaigns are active or projects are live.
However, an outsourced marketing partner is paid for what they produce – whether it’s writing blogs, optimizing websites, launching inbound campaigns, and so on. Since there is no paying for down-time, the cost savings compared to running a full-fledged in-house marketing department are dramatic and typically run into the tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars a year.
2. Access to the Latest Expertise
Obviously, in-house marketing professionals are knowledgeable and deliver value. However – and just as obviously – they cannot regularly stay on top of emerging best practices outside of their traditional marketplace because there are only so many hours in the day.
An outsourced marketing partner has access to knowledge, trends, insights – as well as pitfalls and risks – that are happening in other industries and sectors, which can be leveraged to serve their clients. For example, an inbound marketing approach that is generating particularly strong results in the healthcare field may also work (in whole or in part) in the enterprise software field, and so on.
3. Different Accountability
We’re calling this “different accountability” instead of “greater accountability”, because we don’t want to imply that in-house marketing department professionals are somehow not held accountable – they most certainly are. However, these professionals are generally held accountable in light of their job function and role, which, of course, is only fair and appropriate.
An outsourced marketing partner, on the other hand, can be held to a different set of standards as laid out in the Service Level Agreement – including specific metrics, KPIs and measures. This “different” kind of accountability can be extremely valuable (if not essential) when it comes to targeting and measuring ROI.
In other words: while employee evaluation is often a qualitative exercise, evaluating a marketing partner is definitively quantitative.
The Bottom Line
The above is by no means a call to end marketing departments. In fact, here at Leap Clixx, many of our clients have very capable and talented in-house marketing teams, and we partner with them by augmenting their processes and, in some cases, leading the way. It’s a collaborative partnership that works extremely well.
Rather, we’re simply highlighting that it’s indeed possible to survive without a traditional marketing department -- provided that the MARKETING is efficient, visionary, expert-led and results-based.
Learn More
To learn more about elevating your marketing team – or having us lead the way – contact Leap Clixx today. As always, your consultation with us is free.
Topics: Inbound Marketing
