In today’s unsettled economic climate, there is simply no leeway for companies to accept average results and sub-standard execution. Due to the proliferation of diverse marketing and media options, it’s also more difficult than ever to create and maintain an in-house department with the requisite depth and breadth of knowledge.
As a result, small and mid-size enterprises are increasingly looking to outsource partners to streamline and unify their overall marketing effort. The reasons for doing this speak to the wide range of daily and long-term challenges faced by the typical marketer. Some of those challenges and solutions outsourcing provides are discussed below.
The need for diverse and relevant expertise.
Relying on “the smartest people in the room” to sculpt and implement your marketing strategy is no longer a viable approach – especially when you consider the channel-specific expertise that can be found outside your company walls. That’s why alignment with the right outsource partner provides an enterprise with several key advantages. The biggest advantage is the ability to affordably access a network of supporting talent and service
providers – often on a nationwide basis.
Resources that are chosen for a particular enterprise – or even a particular project – can be assembled into a virtual team of experts. This team can be retained for follow-up efforts, adjusted to meet changing needs, or totally revamped if the next assignment requires a markedly different combination of expertise and skill sets.
Flexibility is everything.
Today, the ability to anticipate and respond to fleeting opportunities is especially crucial. Accordingly, an enterprise needs the strategic and organizational mobility to shift gears at a moment’s notice – while keeping a continual eye on market and response indicators that signal the need for tactical adjustments.
In the new best-selling book The Future Arrived Yesterday: The Rise Of The Protean Corporation and What It Means For You, Michael Malone speaks of shape-shifting organizations that “will be able to adapt and change themselves at lightning speed… yet they will retain at their core something enduring and unchanging.”
Nowhere will this flexibility be more crucial than in a company’s marketing operations. Enterprises will continually be faced with the need to adjust their product mixes and in extreme cases to reinvent their customer value proposition – to maintain relevancy and competitive advantage in today’s rapidly changing markets.