In our previous blog “Successfully balancing excellence – innovating into Multi Channel value, tales from the Shed” we explained the thinking and the leadership actions we worked through in taking the Shed and expanding it from a Publicity led agency, into a fully-fledged Multi Channel Marketing agency. This week we will pull the old switcheroo and put our thinking to the customer side of the equation, and have a chat about why taking your marketing and outsourcing it to an agency ( ahem The Shed), can be a very good idea for your business whilst acknowledging all the reasons that this may be challenging.

So because we are in the Shed, the coffee is good, the tea is strong and the Monte Carlo’s are fresh; lets rip the band-aid off on the big ticket item upfront, the fears. Yes Jan, we need to talk about your need for control.

Will I lose control?

The biggest reason we hear from the market about why not to outsource your marketing is the unsaid one. We hear a lot about being close to the business, about knowing how things work and about deep understanding of products and clients. Most of this is noise for “I am really scared of losing control”. Control of my product, my clients and my narrative.

We completely agree that you own your product and your clients, so rest easy about that, no one is telling you how to run your business and product lines, but we are pulling you up on the narrative piece. There is a reason you are very good at what you do and why we are very good at what we do.

Narrative my dear, is our damn to give.

We spend a lot of time honouring your intent and your culture with it. So please, you have no need to worry about narrative. No one can take it away from you, they can however, make it better, brighter and clearer. They can take your little ray of light and make it shine. And if your ray of light is a thunderclap they can do that too, because they have experts in both rays of light and thunderclaps. You on the other hand may just have someone who deals best in cloud formation. When you have only one or two disciplines at your fingertips then the idea’s for creative marketing are going to stay in the one bandwidth. This can be very limiting to both you and the new markets you might be denying the pleasure of your company.

See our point yet?

If not then let’s spell it out, here are our three top reasons why you should outsource your marketing:-

1.Value for Money

Better than a free set of steak-knives you can get experts in multiple multi-channel disciplines for a single rate without the overheads, the recruiting costs, the payroll, and the performance tracking. With a successful agency partnership for outsourced marketing you are getting all the experts at your fingertips and the best part is that they will report their performance to you. So much easier !

2. Choice and flexibility

Faster than the times at Ridgemont High, for most organisations their customer and therefore their marketing needs will pivot on a pixel. Having a generalist in the office is handy, but not so much the waiting for them to go out and find the expert when you needed it done yesterday ( crisis communications are a great example here….not something you want to delay on ! )
It is much easier to call your trusty account manager, give them the brief and have the work underway without worrying about signing up another outsourced provider contract and deal with another round of negotiations. Plus if your partnership agency is really in partnership with you, they will have scoped the new direction and put it under your nose before you realised you needed it anyway.

3.Objectivity and Licence

Just like the landscape gardener who has the most overgrown garden in the street and the plumber with one working bathroom out of three, the challenge for a creative role like Marketing is to balance the needs of the office culture ( and dare we say it, the politics) with the basic human need of keeping one’s job. This is why some truly weak propositions get airspace, because despite everyone else thinking it is a bad idea to promote your apparent monopolistic reign of your market with your own board-game they don’t want to upset the boss who thinks it’s a very cool idea. With an agency partnership the agency has a duty to you the client to think ahead and prevent downstream impacts of poor choices plus a duty to its own reputation to not be the agency who delivered a terrible campaign. It is far easier to work with honesty and at arms-length.

Here at Shed we truly believe that outsourced marketing is the most sustainable model for the future and that by producing a catalogue of the best in class disciplines, the results for our clients will be:-

• Organisation and Product Brand Awareness to your target customers and media
• Leader Brand Awareness, showcasing the heroes of your organisation
• Knowledge Ownership, highlighting your people as the experts of your field
• Cultural Awareness, why you are worthy of customer and consumer interest
• Service and Delivery capability, ensuring trust in execution

Thanks for the chat, we would love to continue the conversation;  our door is always open and the kettle is always on.