5 Reasons You May Need Marketing as a Managed Service
Five reasons you may want managed marketing as a service: emphasizing marketing, cost control, improving marketing tactics, a lack of expertise, and sales support.
Blog Post
8 minute read
Feb 01, 2024
Continually cooking up interesting, unique, and engaging marketing campaigns is challenging, and the longer you’re marketing the same products and services, the harder it is to generate new and effective ideas.
Yet, it’s critical that modern organizations continually market themselves in fresh and creative ways without losing the core of their messaging. This helps businesses stay relevant and competitive among a generation of consumers who are constantly bombarded with content from every angle.
Marketing as a managed service alleviates these pain points by supplementing and enhancing existing marketing capabilities.
With a managed marketing team, the right tools and the right talent are delivered directly to your doorstep without any recruiting or additional staffing, giving you access to both experts and top-of-the-line technology. After all, building a fully-fledged in-house marketing team can cost a hefty sum that some organizations simply cannot fit into the budget.
The following sections explore managed marketing services in more depth and where they offer the most benefit.
5 Signs You Should Consider Managed Marketing Services
Managed marketing services aren’t for everyone. Organizations that already have a fully staffed marketing department in-house, for example, might not benefit from managed marketing as a service.
That said, there are plenty of organizations staff about 30 marketing professionals, they may not have the expertise or resources available to conduct significant data analysis or establish long term strategy. Many others don’t have any internal marketing capabilities whatsoever.
Here are five signs that you’re in a position to benefit from managed marketing as a service:
As a member of the executive team, your main priorities likely revolve around boosting the bottom line as much as possible. If you’re dialed in on operations and workflows, or perfecting your product however, marketing might end up on the back burner as a lower priority.
There’s nothing wrong with putting your time and attention where you’re most passionate, but to build a business this needs to be balanced with powerful and engaging marketing.
To achieve the balance between product and service focus, without splitting your attention, consider establishing a strategic partnership with a managed marketing provider. By bringing on outside marketing power, you can continue pouring yourself into the products and services, while experts handle things like building brand awareness and digital marketing channels.
2. Costly Marketing Budget
Digital marketing has proven extremely effective over the last decade. The result is two-pronged. Firstly, its use is widespread and the market itself is flooded with options.
Secondly, as competition in the digital space increases, those who can are also increasing their digital marketing budgets, forcing others to follow suit to remain competitive.
Staffing an in-house marketing team that can keep up with rapidly shifting trends while consistently and successfully executing an omnichannel strategy takes a lot of time, and more maybe more importantly, a large investment.
Between hiring costs, salaries, benefits, and turnover, you might be able to get more value from your marketing budget by working with a managed marketing service provider.
3. Poor Marketing Results
In baseball, a batting average of .300 is considered to be excellent. This means the batter is striking out 70% of the time. Yet, a success rate of only 30% is highly regarded. While you don’t want seven out of ten of your campaigns to fail, it’s good to keep in mind that your none of your campaigns are going to be perfect, and that marketing is by no means an exact science.
In fact, even if a marketing campaign is deemed a failure for any number of reasons regarding efficacy or ROI, there are likely very valuable lessons and insights that can be pulled and applied to future strategies.
So instead of throwing your hands up in frustration and writing off marketing altogether, consider looking into how past campaigns did or didn’t succeed, where you’re doing things right, and where there’s room for improvement.
By working with a managed marketing service provider, you won’t only have access to a team of experts who can help you audit past campaigns for critical insights, but they can also help you take those insights and weave them into future campaigns. All-in-all, this makes it easier to completely revamp and elevate your marketing strategy.
4. Lack of Expertise and Technology
A strong marketing team requires a lot of expertise in several areas, including SEO, email marketing, video production, copywriting, design, and strategy to name a few. In short, there are a lot of moving parts for an in-house marketing team to cover. Not to mention the technology required to execute modern marketing strategies.
Much like a tight budget affects hiring and department size, it can also profoundly influence the tools that are available to you.
Marketing lives at the intersection of data and creativity, and if you don’t have the right technology to conduct data analysis, marketing audits, and consumer research, your marketing tactics will be uninformed and likely less effective than they could be.
When working with a managed marketing service provider, though, data analysis, consumer research, and marketing technology are all brought to the table and served to you on a platter, removing a significant amount of guesswork and productivity waste.
5. Stagnating Sales
If your product is great but your sales are showing signs of stagnation, you could be dealing with an ineffective strategy for growing your market share and increasing brand awareness.
Connecting with buyers requires a streamlined and simple message—something that can be achieved to great effect through digital marketing.
If you’re still relying solely on more traditional methods of generating leads with your sales team and not seeing desired improvements, it might be time to start investing in a more sophisticated marketing strategy that makes use of both traditional and digital marketing channels.
You can also use marketing audits and analysis to identify where campaigns are struggling, and where they’re finding success. You can conduct these audits yourself, or with the help of a strategic managed marketing service partner.
What to Expect With Managed Marketing Services
Before entering any partnership, it’s important to understand what you’re getting yourself into and what you can expect to receive.
Let’s take a look at what organizations can expect from a high-quality managed marketing service provider.
Skilled and Experienced Experts
When you partner with a managed service provider for your marketing, you instantly gain access to a roster of talented professionals to help you in your efforts.
Hiring an outside team gives you a key advantage through the diverse array of skills, perspectives, and experience that they bring to the table.
Every stage of the campaign development, from research and analysis, to ideation and conception, and all the way through execution, is overseen by marketing specialists who are dedicated to your account and your success.
Enterprise-Level Tools
Marketers use a wide range of tools to help them in their efforts—whether it’s data analysis to uncover insights about your customers’ behavior, how you’re ranking on Google, or your monthly traffic metrics.
Just a few examples of marketing tech include CRMs, analytics, design software, video editing platforms, and many other software programs. Bringing all of these professional-level software suites in-house requires both budget and expertise.
However, in partnering with a managed marketing services provider, you can confidently expect to have top-of-the-line marketing technology on your side.
Budget-Conscious Planning
This is, of course, the primary concern of any decision maker. Cost efficiency is a huge factor when considering a managed service partnership.
While many organizations prefer a one or two-year contract, a quality provider will want to work with you for the long term to establish, execute, measure, and modify strategies for the best results possible.
Additionally, by working with a managed marketing service provider, you avoid the costs involved with hiring a full team in-house. Managed marketing services make high-level marketing strategy available to those who need it most: growing businesses.
Final Thoughts on Marketing as a Managed Service
There are several reasons that an organization might want to partner with a managed marketing services provider. Whether it’s for cost control, creative ideation and brainstorming, a strategy overhaul, or anything in between, consider a managed marketing service provider before spending the time and money on staffing a comprehensive marketing team in-house.
Managed marketing services may be just what you need to take your marketing campaigns, brand awareness, and market share to the next level.
