Outsourcing Your Marketing Efforts

By David Allred

Outsourcing Your Marketing Efforts

An outsourced marketing team offers the expertise to work alongside you to ramp up or support your marketing efforts without additional in-house overhead. Let us help you turn this race into a relay. Read Time: 2 Minutes

As our marketplaces continue to evolve and marketing gets more fragmented (and complicated), the debates over whether clients should “in-house or outsource” their marketing efforts are heating up. Today, we want to offer some insight into why the topic of outsourcing some or all of your in-house marketing efforts is being talked about more frequently and provide guidance in your quest to create and manage your marketing efforts efficiently and effectively. Are we biased? Of course! We do this for a living. Are we right? Read on and you decide. 

In recent conversations with various smaller to mid-size service-sector clients, we have encountered a common theme: managing marketing in-house is becoming ever more challenging, and there are two primary reasons. First, advances in marketing technology in recent years have been exponential and often overwhelming for an in-house marketing manager or even a small in-house marketing team to master. The second most common challenge we hear is related to the difficulty of recruiting, training, and retaining young professionals (YPs) who have the required experience and the commitment to stay with an employer long enough to build an effective marketing program. 

Let’s start with the 3 reasons why recruiting (and retaining) YPs for in-house marketing roles is particularly challenging: 

  1. Your (single) business will likely not offer enough variety of day-to-day challenges to keep YPs engaged.  
  2. YPs may not find much in common with their peers within your business and will be particularly frustrated by the lack of marketing mentorship opportunities. 
  3. YPs understand in advance (or will soon understand after a year or so) that their opportunity for upward mobility within your organization is extremely limited.  

So, why do agencies succeed at recruiting and retaining YPs when in-house marketing departments often struggle? Well, agencies offer the complete opposite experience of small, in-house marketing departments. YPs in the marketing and creative space crave the variety that comes when working in a setting that offers the stimulation that is inherently varied at agencies as they work on several different clients each day, they are typically working in proximity to and with a number of like-minded peers and multiple mentors every day, and there are almost always numerous opportunities for upward mobility within the same organization. 

When it comes to the challenge of keeping up with something that is complicated, it has been said that two heads are better than one. But when it comes to keeping up with today’s myriad of rapidly evolving marketing strategies and media options, 5 to 7 heads thinking about and working on your account (and on accounts with similar challenges) on an ongoing basis is even better. It allows for more specialization within marketing disciplines and results in a more well-rounded marketing team. And, since we all know that consistency is critical to the long-term success of all marketing programs, the depth of 5- to 7-person teams provides built-in marketing service provider continuity for clients that is virtually impossible to create in-house. 

These challenges are leading many smaller to mid-size service-sector clients to partner in more varied ways with agencies and other specialized marketing services providers. And increasingly with our client relationships, we are merging the more high-level, traditional agency of record relationship providing more typical agency services with what would have been considered the duties of an in-house marketing department in what we are calling Outsourced Marketing Programs (OMPs). 

But, no matter how we work with clients, in every case we provide a consistent team of marketing specialists at our client’s disposal with the potential to work (and in some cases even train and retrain our client's in-house staff) in virtually every marketing capacity as needed.  

As always, thank you for reading and we would love your thoughts on this topic! Please send feedback to Susan.