Comments on: Startups, Can you really outsource marketing?

By: Philippines Outsourcing

Philippines Outsourcing — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 10:01:40 +0000

based on our experiences, start-ups can only outsource marketing when they have established a working system which can be used by the outsourced team to market the services or products.

outsourcing at the wrong time is like leaving a baby alone in the curb while learning how to walk.

By: Indie Game Marketing Tips via Seth Godin

Indie Game Marketing Tips via Seth Godin — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 20:26:42 +0000

[...] that he mentions for Indie Game Marvelopers. Ironically I discovered this video while reading Startups Game Developers can you afford to outsource marketing (also another great [...]

By: Soumya Desai

Soumya Desai — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:06:02 +0000

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

By: Vijay Menon

Vijay Menon — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:59:06 +0000

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

By: Ashish

Ashish — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 10:27:31 +0000

Yep – but don’t you think there is a B2B marketing that happens @ OEM level? [Think of Intel Inside campaign]

By: Vivek Rajagopalan

Vivek Rajagopalan — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 02:05:22 +0000

Sure you can. Think OEMs . It happens quite a lot in the hardware business and it catching up too in software.

By: Akram Quraishi

Akram Quraishi — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:33:44 +0000

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.

By: marvin

marvin — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 10:06:43 +0000

awesome article.

By: Sahil

Sahil — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 09:54:55 +0000

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).

By: Cogzidel

Cogzidel — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:50:03 +0000

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.

By: Sameer

Sameer — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:46:38 +0000

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.

By: Sumeet

Sumeet — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:38:27 +0000

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.