Outsourced Marketing – Dress for Success while Stripping away Excess Cost

In today’s market, the struggle to get to the next customer is becoming more and more difficult. New technologies and tools launched on a daily basis have changed the rules of the marketing game. Social networks now empower consumers, changed the relationship between enterprises and their customers, and created a new reality that is difficult to cope with. How can you therefore detect new behavior patterns and buying habits? What should you do to have a meaningful dialog with the new consumer? How can you leverage new technologies to benefit your organization? Where should you invest your marketing resources? Organizations find themselves more involved with these questions than with their own field of expertise.

One of the main hesitations, especially among small to medium-size companies, is whether to invest in recruiting a marketing manager and marketing team or continue working without them. Even when there is business growth, there is not always a budget to establish a marketing department that will map and evaluate market needs and competitors, create a corporate identity, produce collaterals, manage public relations, produce events, foster collaborations, and in general promote the company’s sales to reach its longed-for financial and business success.

The solution is very simple – outsourced marketing. Instead of recruiting, qualifying and/or increasing the company’s workforce, marketing management is outsourced to an external expert company. More and more organizations around the world are now using outsourcing for marketing, either because they don’t need a full time marketing manager or because they need to save resources and make their processes more effective. At times, marketing outsourcing is effective also for large companies, which are characterized by lengthy bureaucratic practices and complex decision-making processes.

From creating a marketing plan, through implementing strategic and tactical marketing activities on the web and in other environments, to unique marketing projects to penetrate into new markets and designing and applying a business development strategy, the range of services provided is virtually endless. Today, to reap utmost benefits, marketing must be more targeted and speak the language of recognized customers. Outsourced marketing enables enterprises to manage their marketing mix more effectively, and to choose the marketing services that are suitable for their needs and target audiences.

There are several issues that must be evaluated when deciding on acquiring outsourced marketing services:

Full return on the investment – the marketing mix and relevant activities are tailor‑adapted to the size of the company, its field of expertise and budget. Don’t be lured by enthusiastic vendors that promise you grandiose marketing tactics that run up high and superfluous expenses and that do not always yield the expected results.
Monitoring and measurement – how do you know that you invested your marketing budget wisely? The marketing-services vendor must have the tools to monitor and measure quality of execution and ROI for any service it provides, so that you can assess the effectiveness of the marketing actions and decide on those that should be pursued or neglected.
Multidisciplinary marketing – all design (strategic) and execution (tactical) services are provided under one roof, for both local and international markets.
Implementation – there are many consultants out there. For outsourced marketing to be effective, the selected vendor must provide you with advice on how to build your marketing plan; but they must also “get their hands dirty” and do the work together with you.
Partnership – when you select an outsourced-marketing vendor, you are in fact choosing a partner, not only a service provider. Make sure you choose an experienced professional and reliable vendor you can trust. This will ensure that your marketing budget and efforts are maximized and that they will achieve your desired business goals.

Many companies benefit from outsourced marketing services and succeed in focusing on the core of their business, improving the quality of their products and services and maximizing time to market. They save resources and costs, and benefit from a broad marketing infrastructure with maximum professional availability – all without investing in establishing and operating an inside marketing department.

American philosopher and author Henry David Thoreau said, “It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” Outsourced marketing can save you both time and money, providing you with the freedom you need to get busy with what’s important – your company and its business growth.