How Kinesis Spends Our Marketing Dollars
It can be difficult to define a marketing budget, but it helps to look at how peers are allocating resources. We decided to start with ourselves.
As businesses begin to recover from the recession, many are using this time to ask hard questions about exactly how they run their organization. For better or worse, the downturn forced many owners to downsize their internal teams and restructure which roles would be handled by employees and what duties could be outsourced. In this first post, I'll examine marketing outsourcing options for the small and mid-sized business owner. Next week, I'll provide a process for selecting the right marketing solution.
The concept of outsourcing is nothing new. While many think of "outsourcing" as sending jobs overseas, modern outsourcing is much more sophisticated. Rather than simply shifting jobs to cheaper markets, many businesses use outsourcing as a strategic way to offload functions that aren't core service offerings. And, as some discover, these service providers (many of which are state-side) can provide superior service at lower costs. Here are just a few examples:
In Portland, firms like Convergence Networks provide an entire team of IT pros, often for less than the cost of one dedicated person.
In the HR space, we've seen the rise of PEO (Professional Employment Firms) and HR outsourcing. These solutions can be a complete turn-key department (payroll, benefits, insurance, and even employee handbooks). Examples in the northwest would include a company like Xenium which serves clients in the Portland and Seattle markets.
Companies like Ruby Receptionists provide an outstanding "virtual receptionist" service, answering and directing calls for a fraction of the price of a "real" receptionist. Ruby provides real, live receptionists and you can finally ditch the annoying auto-attendant robot.
Of course, this is just the beginning. Kinesis has successfully used an outsourced CFO firm for the last year (with amazing results) as well as an outsourced benefits provider. Even with this deep network, I continually look for new ways to leverage outside experts; this strategy allows Kinesis to focus on what we do best (marketing) and reduce our time spent on business operations outside of our primary expertise.
While many businesses have grown comfortable outsourcing portions of their operations (if you have an accountant, you're already "outsourcing"), few have figured out a good way to outsource marketing. To help owners navigate the marketing landscape, I've created a easy guide for picking a partner for almost any business.
To begin, I'll start by identifying the market; later, I'll walk you through the steps to choose the right provider based on your business size and goals.
When it comes to outsourcing your marketing, your options fall into roughly 6 buckets:
Now that you have a sense of the options for outsourced marketing, you can begin the process of assessing which type of service provider is the right fit for your company.
If your business has an in-house designer, but no real marketing strategist, you might consider a Lone Gunman or a Strategic Agency. On the other hand, if you're a small business with few internal marketing resources, stay tuned: my next post will outline a simple methodology for selecting partners based on your goals, your business size, and marketing budget.
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