The Benefits of Outsourced Marketing Part 1

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I spent a good deal of my formative marketing years at Microsoft. Although we never thought so at the time, marketing budget was not usually something that held us back. Outsourcing almost any marketing role was acceptable and seen as a smart business move. After all, if you could get it externally, why would you need to add an FTE?

SoftBrands, the company I work for today is a much smaller and much more traditional software company. (about 100M USD in revenues) When I took over leadership of the marketing department here I quickly noticed that almost everything was done in-house. A couple functions such as public relations and design were outsourced to agencies, but even the bits of those that could be done in-house were.

When I asked “why” the team member with the most seniority on the team said, “If we don’t do it ourselves people will think we can’t.”

I’m sure the sentiment he was expressing is pretty common. It’s the idea that we’re supposed to be the marketing experts so we should know how to do this stuff. If we don’t, why do they need us?

In this series of posts, I will give you my many, many reasons why I think FIRST about whether something can be done by an outside resource BEFORE I think about doing it in-house.

Reason #1 Keep Costs Down
The natural assumption is that using an outside vendor can be very costly. Let’s take the simple case of designing collateral.

We probably all have enough of these projects to keep someone busy full-time. However, designers are usually not writers so unless you have an exceptional writer on your staff who is also skilled at design, don’t expect them to be able to both write the brochure as well as format it.

Cost for an FTE vary by region, of course. In any major city in the US when you look at salary plus overhead you’re easily looking at an investment of over 100K to bring someone on full-time. The bottomline is you can buy a lot of very professional design work for 100K. And, unlike an FTE that you hire, if you don’t like the work, you can quickly dissolve the relationship and move on to a new designer. Getting rid of someone you hired is a lot more stressful than changing vendors.

Stay tuned for more reasons why you outsourcing marketing functions is a good business decision.