HRO Today’s MaaS platform is creating unique, powerful and cost-effective marketing solutions for companies looking to lead the industry.
By Dan Davenport
Early in my career I had a creative director who was famous for saying, “when you try to be everything to everyone, you end up being nothing to no one.” Specialization isn’t just a great go to market strategy for your products and services, it’s also good advice when you are looking to resource your marketing function.
The discipline of marketing has grown innately complex over the past 15 years and that trend is increasing on an accelerating curve. With the addition of new platforms, medias and technologies, and increased analytics and automation, our profession is broadening and our professionals are narrowing their focus into distinct areas of marketing. In other words, they’re specializing.
I often explain the transformation in marketing this way. When I started my career in the early 90s, we were sailing ships, placing our valuable brand, messaging and differentiators on the deck of a vessel, launching it into the sea and then watching it go. We were hoping it would benefit from our planning, but also knew there was a lot out there beyond our control. We knew the patterns of the tides, and we knew the weather predictions; we applied historical best practices learned from the ships that sailed before ours, but once in the water, it was sink or swim. When we arrived, if we arrived, and largely where we arrived, was at best, an educated guess. Don’t believe me, just ask the Ayds Diet Candy Company. Don’t recall who they are? You see my point.
Today, marketers are flying the most sophisticated rocket ships. We know the exact time of launch and landing, airspeed and altitude, and the detailed GPS coordinates at any given moment. We also have the ability to make mid-flight adjustments to account for changing conditions or increased opportunities. Using advanced tools, real time analytics and synergistic media strategies, marketing has not only become a precise instrument, but I believe it has become a predictable revenue model.
These changes are wholly welcome, but without change management, a series of unique challenges within organizations becomes present. Marketing departments from the past were effectively staffed by three disciplines: a strategist, a copywriter and a designer. That trio was very effective at building a marketing plan, preparing creatives, buying media, and waiting for the tide to turn. But put that group in the cockpit of a rocket ship however, and they will struggle to know the aft from their elbow.
Today, sophisticated marketing departments require strategists, digital, brand and may be even mobile; analytics, product marketers, database management, social media curators, video developers, customer evangelists, UX/UI designers, Web developers, event planners, virtual and off-line; and your traditional designers, now including digital, print, re-touchers, illustrators and 3D as well as writers, content, headlines, long-form, short-form, bloggers SEO and technical.
If you don’t have all of those skill sets within your marketing department, you are under-utilizing the resources at your disposal and not keeping pace with your competition. If you do have all of these FTE positions within your organization, your ship is likely sinking under it’s own weight. So what do you do to stay competitive, maintain best next practices within marketing and control cost? Fractionalized marketing resources.
It’s the latest, greatest thing, and a fast-growing trend. While web developers are a critical component of your marketing needs, the truth is, you don’t need those skills 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year. And the same holds true for various writers, strategists and all of the other functions associated with the modern marketing department.
Having access to highly skilled, highly qualified, and deeply experienced marketing professionals within those specialized categories creates a significant competitive advantage; and proves to deliver meaningful results in building a brand, driving demand generation, and increasing sales enablement. Unless you are a F500 organization, it’s likely you’ll need to engage those resources in a fractionalized manner; yielding a part-time team of strategists and project managers who can call upon all of the other disciplines as needed to deliver the very best campaign/marketing product/strategy, expertly designed to achieve your stated goals and within a cost-conscious solution.
The MaaS team has been delivering this level of expertise, while reducing costs and maximizing output for five years. Our team, and our unique understanding of the HR Outsourcing market, creates yet another competitive advantage for organizations seeking to attract the HRO Today audience. If you’d like to hear more about MaaS, you can reach us at marketing@sharedxpertise.com.
