Marketers have outsourced creative, right-brained activities since as early as seventeenth century. That was the genesis of advertising industry. Since then companies have evolved to a stage today, when marketers outsource a majority of their functions – be it direct marketing, advertising, events, media planning, and even analytics, which was hitherto closely held within the “ivory tower”. Some have outsourced more than others. But now, an even broader adoption of outsourcing is underway – that of entire marketing operations.
There are two basic reasons why this trend is gaining momentum. First – outsourcing can save money and improve quality. A large IT product company which outsourced its email marketing function was able to reduce its cost of email marketing by 30% while improving the conversion rate by 15%.
Second – outsourcing provides expertise that companies may lack, especially in the areas which involve new media like digital or are labour intensive like database management. When a large beverage company was looking to improve the quality of its website and dynamically create 100s of personalized sites for its clients, they adopted outsourcing whereby the service provider created a “website factory” which allowed the client to create brand-compliant, highly personalized websites in a matter of hours, which would otherwise have taken days to do.
So if all the functions in the marketing department can be outsourced, and it is only a matter of time that it will, what is left for marketers to do? The answer is what all marketers have been craving to do since they passed out of college but just haven’t had the time to do – “think strategically” by engaging more deeply with customers (internal and external) to build impactful marketing plans. As noted by Harvard Business School professors Gail J. McGovern and John Quelch in their article in the March 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review “They also need to play “ringmaster” by building an ecosystem of partners who deliver to the marketing plan.”
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Tags: analytics, email marketing, Harvard Business Review, marketing, marketing operations, outsourcing, outsourcing marketing
That will catalyse the global virtual outsourcing market, says Michael Wolff … Direct Marketing