Inside the marketing tipping point

There's a point in every growing company's life where a step-change is needed to build on the momentum so far.

For most B2B companies that sell high-value, complex products and services (think high-end professional services, enterprise software, commercial financial services as examples), there's a point where something needs to change when it comes to finding new customers.

These companies have grown successfully through effective business networking by senior executives, client referrals and word of mouth.

Other marketing efforts are normally haphazard and based on best intentions. However, the business is now at a size where it's simply not possible to scale up one-to-one marketing activities and generate the kind of qualified opportunities needed to feed a growing number of mouths. 

A more systematic, repeatable, corporatised approach to marketing needs to be put in place. 

Usually, for B2B firms, that means switching on PR and digital marketing in a programmatic way to ensure leads are being generated around the clock and moved through a qualification and nurture process at scale.

The strategy question at this point for many companies is: "Do we buy or build this capability?"

Building a marketing competency in-house makes sense. It seems relatively affordable and manageable, and you get to build corporate competency. 

Here are two ways most companies think about it:

1.     Hire an inexpensive, junior marketer with limited experience.
2.    Hire an expensive senior strategist with lots of very relevant industry and business experience.

A junior marketer is low-cost, usually a digital native and great at making digital marketing tools work, and can drive activity day to day.  

The problem is usually that junior marketers tend to lack business experience and, therefore, have limited ability to make informed judgements. They have limited industry and customer knowledge, and usually don't have a lot of authority to put content into market; they require an executive to approve even the simplest of campaigns.

When these problems arise, as they inevitably tend to, those same executives that were trying to build scale find themselves a bottleneck and, more commonly, also realise that the junior marketing resource is relying on them to direct their efforts.  

Usually, marketing is not the executive's forte and they don't really have the time to give to it anyway, and so the company is back to square one.

This can be disillusioning for the junior marketer too, who finds they aren't being mentored or developed properly while senior executives complain about the quality of work, pace and level of supervision required.  

Of course, hiring a junior marketer can sometimes work, but not often in a company where the marketing function is still being developed (as opposed to organisations with a mature marketing department).

A proven senior marketing resource will definitely bring value to most organisations. They can build an aligned marketing strategy to support business objectives, work on complex buyer personas drawn from previous experience, develop messaging, specify marketing technologies, collect customer insights and work on customer experience, run website redevelopments and manage a whole host of important projects.  

However, most will not want to work at a granular level and actually produce or deliver campaigns. 

They did that kind of work earlier in their career and it's not where their value or interest lies.

In fact, many are not familiar with the specifics of emerging digital marketing tools, other than at a planning and strategy level.

Therefore, it's not uncommon for a senior marketer to expect to work with a team of internal specialists (in bigger firms) or to immediately hire an integrated marketing agency and PR firm. 

For some managing directors and CEOs of emerging companies, this is slightly flummoxing.

Some honestly think an expensive marketing resource is exactly the jack-of-all-trades they needed to get marketing off the ground and pumping out campaigns (particularly given the salary). Some senior marketers will give it a shot but, usually, they realise that there's a fatal mismatch in expectations and move on pretty quickly.  

The alternate strategy to hiring a junior or a senior resource is to outsource (or to let the senior marketing resource bring in outsourced support).

Outsourced marketing offers some compelling arguments:

1. Cost. Outsourced marketing is usually a variable cost. Generally, activity can be scaled up and down (within limits) to match business plans, product launches, cash flow and other business realities. The fixed salary cost doesn't exist and there are no specialist tools or platforms that need to be bought to support the marketing function.

2. Scale. Outsourcing marketing gives you access to a whole team for the same price you'd be paying for one senior salary. A good integrated agency can bring a diverse program team together to build and execute a vast array of campaigns and activities. No single person could hope to be experts in every marketing area including web development, design, content writing, marketing automation optimisation, email marketing, search or social marketing. A team provides scale without the cost of hiring individual experts in each of those areas.   

3. Expertise. You should get strategy and planning insights from your outsourced marketing partner based on their work with many other B2B firms. They will know what's working and what's not, and should leap you ahead of the organic learning curve.

4. Simplicity. It's easier to manage an outsourced team. Working with a paid supplier means you should expect to receive proactive, structured communication, expert counsel and a great customer experience.  There’s usually a single point of primary contact making it efficient to manage programs.

5. Risk reduction. As you grow, your outsourced marketing partner should be able to scale up with you while bearing the costs and risk of scaling so you don’t have to. 

If your B2B firm is at the marketing tipping point and you want to know what marketing-as-a-managed service could look like, learn more here.