Should You Outsource Your Marketing?

It was #b2bchat, a lively Twitter discussion for B2B marketers, that first renewed my interest. Both the in-house and independent marketers involved described a shifting decision-making process I knew we were experiencing at our agency. During the chat and in subsequent conversations, Stéphane Poirier of Exo Marketing shared a brief blog post on the subject and later added an excellent expanded post, Outsourced Marketing: Manage Your Marketing Differently. (That Poirier’s posts and tweets are bilingual, in French and English, only adds to my appreciation.)

Within a week, I saw another discussion on changes in the in-house versus outsourced decision process occurring during #mfgchat. And soon there was an article from the always-on-top-of-things MarketingProfs that was written specifically for B2B organizations of roughly 100 employees, on whether to outsource graphic design, branding, or multimedia work to an agency. Then a client requested help on a project they had started in-house but could not complete to their satisfaction. Clearly it was time to get my thoughts together about what has been evolving over the past few years.

Marketing has changed

There’s no question but that marketing has changed. Marketing has changed because customers, markets, media, and technology have changed, and continue to change rapidly. Customers have more information and higher expectations; the media is fragmented and now includes social networks and blogs with voracious appetite for content; and the rise of complex distribution and analysis platforms is fueling technological dependence.

A marketing firm, of necessity, lives these changes on a daily basis and needs to develop competencies and excel at adapting and leading marketing practices on behalf of its clients, or it will not survive.

For an in-house marketing team at a SMB, Small to Medium-sized Business, to develop new specialized expertise and maintain these competencies requires more and more time, money and focus away from your company’s core competencies, customers, and products. Though every company is different, you’ll find certain benefits of outsourcing in today’s complex and competitive markets are mentioned repeatedly.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Outsourcing

Stéphane Poirier offered six benefits for managers who outsource marketing:

• Access to a large array of marketing competencies that you do not possess in your team.
• Access to experienced specialists that know about best practices, tools, and technologies related to their expertise.
• Access to an independent source of information and ideas, providing a marketing perspective that goes beyond your corporate culture.
• Better control over the quantity of time required to manage your marketing department, as well as a better utilization of all your resources (internal and external). This lowers costs and increases quality.
• Transferring fixed costs to variable costs, increasing your flexibility and adaptation speed with regards to the perpetual evolution of markets.
• Greater capacity to quickly seize opportunities when they arise, giving you a significant advantage that comes with being “The First Mover”.

Mike Etzinger’s Marketing Profs article, “Outsourced Marketing: Does it make sense for You?” offered nine key benefits of outsourcing:

1. Higher-Quality Output

2. Cost Efficiency

3. Economies of Scale

4. More Collaboration

5. Faster Work

6. A Bigger Pool of Talented Professionals

7. More Flexibility

8. Helps Companies Focus on Core Competencies

9. Better Technical Expertise

These are two solid lists of outsourcing benefits with only partial overlap, and both writers also acknowledged some of the advantages of staying in-house, such as closer to organization knowledge and making small changes faster and less expensively. There was still something missing.

The Missing Factor in the Decision: Long-term Relationships

Although I agreed with the discussions on changing context and the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing versus in-house marketing, there was still something that didn’t quite mesh with our experiences. Finally I realized it was the view of a marketing outsourcing decision as a one-time, either/or choice fixed in time. I tend to see the outsourcing versus in-house choice more as a continuous revisiting of best fit for each project within a collaborative client-agency relationship.

Marketing Self Sufficiency

As new marketing practices and competencies emerge, it is natural that these are developed first at the marketing agency, where marketing is our daily focus. But after working with a SMB client on multiple, similar projects, we want to see if marketing self sufficiency is a possibility for tasks with a similar profile, or perhaps a shift in roles and responsibilities will provide the best ROI. A few examples of this outsourcing-to-in-house progression and shift in roles may help.

Website

After a content management system website is ‘outsourced’ to be designed and built, most clients are enabled to freshen content and maintain the site in-house. Only a major redesign or expansion may require outsourcing again, which frees the agency to refine new techniques or focus on SEO.

News releases and announcements

The development of an established format, distribution lists, and key messages may be outsourced, but as time goes by recurring public relations activities are more efficiently handled in-house.

Blogs

Developing a business blog and the practices of a successful blogger is something many clients need assistance with during the first year. As the agency’s role decreases for design and writing, there may be time available for increased editing and integrated promotion.

Social Media Management

Social media may be ideal for shared client-agency responsibilities. Beyond the commonly outsourced task of applying brand elements to social network sites, marketing agencies are more likely to have developed the analytical skills needed for the monitoring, tracking and analysis of social media, as well as being able to spread the base cost of expensive platforms across clients. If social media plays an increasing role in the client’s integrated marketing program, developing in-house capabilities will become cost effective.

Personally, I am still noodling on the outsourcing versus in-house marketing decision process. As markets and clients’ needs continue to evolve, the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing evolve too. Meanwhile, an outsourcing checklist or decision tree feels like a good topic for a future post.