Startups, Can you really outsource marketing?
One of the challenges with most of the tech startups is that even though they are damn good at technology, they do fairly mediocre when it comes to marketing their service.
Recently, I was in conversation with a startup and the company while working on brand overhauling is betting on one big thing – hiring a marketing guy. They want to hire a marketing guy to attend all the seminars, they want to hire a marketing guy to market their product, they want to hire a marketing guy to create their social media marketing plan (and everything else).
And while they wait for the ‘perfect match’, founders aren’t interested in doing what they have set out for the marketing role.
Maybe they do not have time to do so, but the final result is that they aren’t marketing their product for a reason which is beyond their control.
Big Fail, if you ask me.
All they want to do is ‘outsource’ (or insource, if you want to call it) the marketing role – strategy that surely works for corporate (heck! that’s why you have so many roles in an org), but not for startups (unless you are heavily heavily funded and have money to $pend).
Sometimes, founders outsource the entire marketing role to SMM (social media marketers)and worry just about the metrics (founders don’t want to fill in the shoes, because it’s not their job!) – another fail.
What’ companies need to realize is that marketing is THE core function of an organization and not a support function (even though you have all the right reasons to not market your product).
What’s your take? Have you encountered similar scenarios, where geeky founders ‘just wait’ for the right man to do their job?
Watch this Seth Godin’s video on why marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department
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Very true ashish.
We decided not to outsource as I see it as very core to our business. Now, recruited someone who can look into it full time and will work directly with management.
Any marketing effort if not executed properly may damage your business, its better not to do anything rather that doing an ad hoc or partial implementation of plans.
I don’t think its a black/white. There are tons of production outfits which leave the marketing, and sometimes even packaging, to large brands which are awesome at that. Airtel, for one, is primarily a marketing and CRM outfit!
If your core play and strength is tech, you might need to market to someone who understands its consumer/enterprise value and takes it there while sharing risk. Sure, if you do have skills that help you market to the target audience directly, awesome. But its not always the best way forward to try and do that if there’s a better bet around, even if it needs you to share profits.
Nice article, Sinha.
Yes, we also tried to have a marketing person, but never stopped our marketing activities as we know losing time on these things doesn’t make sense.
Then, we realised that it would be more appropriate if we do it ourselves and that’s what happening currently.
Thanks & Regards.
You need to eventually build a team who can take on marketing but that does not mean you wait for the perfect match (as you rightly said).
awesome article.
Well we are in the exact situation now. We are looking for someone as we are already preoccupied by the tech stuff. But we plan to hire someone who can work in-house and have direct co-ordination with us so that the marketing efforts go hand in hand.
Sure you can. Think OEMs . It happens quite a lot in the hardware business and it catching up too in software.
Yep – but don’t you think there is a B2B marketing that happens @ OEM level? [Think of Intel Inside campaign]
You have a point when you say that marketing is core and should not be outsourced. But that’s only true when you use marketing with a big M — when you use it also as a tool to research the market and use the feedback to design or fine tune your product/service/price for the market.
But most startups do not use marketing for this purpose since they know exactly what they intend to offer to the market. In such cases you need marketing with a small m — to create messaging and take it out to the market through branding, ads, PR, analyst, tradeshows, social and online media, and so on.
Marketing with a small m is definitely done better by a professional marketer since he or she is expert at building and telling a story, and has a network of agencies and freelancers who can get the work done efficiently. Remember, the modern CMO is like a ringmaster managing a network of content creation folks, external agencies, web designers and so on. And since a CMO is expensive to hire and difficult to retain, there is a strong case for outsourcing one.
I’ve acted as an outsourced CMO to startups and I speak from personal experience. Do see my website and blog to see why an outsourced CMO might make sense for your company.
Vijay Menon
http://www.vijaymenon.com
Thanks for the nice article and good discussions. Ashish has mentioned marketing in the narrow sense of marketing plans, and Vijay extended it (big M) to include market research and tuning of product.
But for start-ups I see a bigger gap in graver aspects of marketing right from clearly defining the customer/market segments, to how/where the organization intends to provide value and earn money from, customer acquisition strategy, identification of complementary solutions/partners etc.
While the marketing plan creation/execution may still be out-sourced, I do not see how the above can be out-sourced – since this is the soul of the company strategy. Unfortunately not many of the techie founders are up-to-it