Marketing has always been an enigma around which businesses could be found speculating. While, it’s recurrent to find people or business confusing marketing to sales, the mystery becomes quandary upon inclusion of stuffs like positioning, branding, communication, digital, social, content, pricing to name a few. Deep dive into each and every stuff that makes a marketing and the puzzle will eventually become riddle. Hence, at the end of a day, the enigma continues with a big question mark.
“Marketing is a secret about a secret. The more you peel-off, the less you know”.
But, the problem isn’t in marketing being an enigma wrapped in mystery. The problem lies in business’ attempt to demystify the same through marketing department. It’s a process that plays protagonist in business strategy. Any attempt to mould it as department will inevitably diminish the impact marketing can have on the business. In essence, marketing is a strategic process that runs in alignment and tandem with various other functional units.
The problem becomes more grave in case of start-up, micro, small, and medium enterprise. The brevity of budget compels such organizations to wear blinkers, wherein the horse sense of entire organization rests upon the C-Tag jockey. What people don’t understand in such organizations is that Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people. The advent and success of “Internet of Things” media further add insult to the injury of such organizations. Digital, social, SEM, SEO, content, etc further demands addition of specialists to so called marketing departments. The end result is that marketing department starts looking bigger than the entire organization put together.
This and many such problems gave birth to a line of service called “Marketing Process Outsourcing (MPO).” The term MPO itself became so lucrative for some companies that they ended up copy-pasting the same content. You can read them Here, Here, and Here. Not sure which one is the first mover. That’s when we at 366Pi decided to launch a “Functional Process Outsourcing (FPO)” service to cater to not just marketing, but beyond.
The mere shift of accountability through outsourcing some or all of the marketing process empowers companies with focus and vision. Either you’re obsessed with budget or constraint on budget, outsourcing the marketing process proves beneficial for either. A holistic ROI measurement on marketing is what I intend to say.
However, the biggest gain comes in a form of mitigation of challenges a usual marketing department finds itself mired in. The challenges could be any, not limited to, of the following:
- Scarcity of resource or fund
- Absence of structured career growth opportunities for employee
- Scarcity of skilled individuals
- Incorrect individuals at key positions
- Non-aligned technology and marketing team leading to use of outdated technology
- Management problem
- Absence of synergy
- Regular turnover
So, how to ensure that you’re using optimized marketing process? Simple, reach out to us or any other specialist in the arena that you know. [email protected] is where you can drop a mail.