Marketing Outsourcing: Featured Article
Is it time to outsource marketing?
Organizations either outsource for reasons of cost - because outsourcing makes better fiscal sense, gives them shared access to best practices and allows for better utilization and deployment of existing resources. The key interplay here being investing in organic capability building vs. outsourcing and hiring plans always seem to trail business growth. The other reason that drives outsourcing is capability (or lack of it) - quite often the right resources are hard to come by.
It is very easy to find low level tactical resources for your team - to run your trade shows, clean your databases, design your collateral or websites and track your marketing campaigns but as you go up the value chain to programs like thought leadership, new media strategies and CRM, the quality and availability of resources just dries up. So the perennial question that CMO organizations are faced with is 'what do we outsource?' and more importantly, 'why do we outsource?'. The answer more often than not lies in the interplay between cost and capability.
While marketing organizations have been pioneers in the space of outsourcing - and we have been doing this long before the days of IT or call center outsourcing, the maturity of outsourcing has been pretty low with a high reliance on traditional advertising or design firms who have clearly not been able to change with the times. The result?
