I was asked this week what’s the value in outsourcing marketing rather than having a staffer take care of the day-to-day things. After all, most workers are computer savvy enough to be able to catch on quickly to website content management systems, desktop publishing, and even html mailings.
While there are several reasons, it all boils down to expertise. Yes, day-to-day marketing activities can be mundane, but in addition to being able to execute, your staff needs to know:
• Best practices – what works, and what doesn’t, for your industry, sector or target demographic.
• Monitoring and metrics – what should be expected for your industry, and how to tweak to obtain those results.
• Legislation – especially critical for eMarketing, where it’s ludicrously easy to get slapped with punitive fines.
• Usability trends – we are all web-savvy, and once we see something more intuitive than usual, we expect that to become the norm. Usability paradigms shift considerably in just a year. Keeping abreast of them means your site doesn’t look tired.
• The big picture – that what they are doing aligns with your business development strategies.
And that’s just the day-to-day stuff. The largest value is in strategic marketing – product and service development, pricing, competitive positioning, expansion plans, target market research. All of these play in determining what you should sell, who to sell it to, how to accomplish this effectively and profitably.
This expertise, while needed primarily for strategic planning, also comes into play for oversight of the day to day activities, ensuring their effectiveness. Marketing activity isn’t enough – the activity needs to be directed in order to produce the desired results.
