MARKETING AS BUSINESS DRIVER

Successful business owners know that marketing drives revenue. However, it is for every company a bold move to spend money without having a guarantee that it will generate new business. This is were young companies start to take different routes. Those brave enough to project a bigger picture of what they really are start to grow, whereas others start to fall behind.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO INVEST IN MARKETING?

In practice, it’s not as black or white as that. Many companies want an excellent external appearance and grow their brand outreach beyond their established community. They simply don’t know how to achieve that.

• Does marketing start with hiring a first part- or even full-time marketer?
• Will a rather small, unknown company get a high profile or extremely talented marketing executive that is affordable and who will stay long enough to bring the company to the next level?
• How big does the budget have to be that the marketing person can become effective in reaching the company goals?

A MARKETING DEPARTMENT COVERED BY ONE PERSON?

If you are lucky you find a person that brings the experience and passion to turn your brand upside down. In some cases, you get a new employee who will listen to the leader’s vision, but complain that it’s not possible to go anywhere near that, at least when you provide a six-digit budget. And then you do a little bit of this, a little bit of that, large marketing projects take ages and the promise of marketing as accelerator for growth turns out to be true for successful companies with budget but not you.

However, even a marketing superstar still needs a budget and will not cover all marketing disciplines it takes to get the job done. Marketers have quite a challenging workfield if they take their business responsibility serious. The perfect, but still pragmatic marketing organization you try to cover in one person looks like that:

• A strategist who develops an executable marketing plan and who will continuously reflect and adapt all marketing activities.
• A content producer who can communicate your product from different angles and keeps your inbound marketing running with continuously fresh and convincing thought leadership.
• A multimedia graphic designer who has technical skills and an experienced, intuitive eye for aesthetics as well as a receptibility for feedback.
• A technical marketer who can ensure a functionality of all your digital communication products and who will be interested to take over SEO matters too (in cooperation with the content colleague).
• A generalist who will cover events management, social media and other communications tasks that might fit better with the marketing team than the back office.
• And a network of specialists you can trust when you need them: photographer, PR expert, video producer, ….

Some roles can be covered by one person, but some definitely not as they are opposed to each other. Technical vs. communication talent. Creativity vs. operational repetitiveness. Small organizations have to compromise on the ideal set-up, but they don’t have to.

THE INNOVATIVE SOLUTION

Agile marketing boutiques are very common in the US and other pioneering countries such as Israel (I am referring here to business & tech, not politics!) and start getting traction in Europe as well. You work with a marketing boutique to have the perfect team constellation or results for your actual needs. Why shouldn’t you if it provides you with cost advantages too? Your external partner has to be an industry expert and needs to be approachable and flexible in order to support your business goals immediately. You might agree on large projects, concrete deliverables or continuous support tasks – depending on your growth stage and internal team set-up. A marketing boutique is a professional group that dedicates their skills to your success based on KPIs, a methodology and enough freedom for discussions and feedback sessions without charging each and every single hour. A marketing boutique creates synergy effects for multiple companies who can’t have all roles covered in their organization on their own.

Marketing is simple, but not easy. It’s not luck, it’s not magic. It’s simply excellent work. If your core business is not marketing, then you should consider visiting a marketing boutique.