Running out of content for your marketing needs, 4 tips to Re-Purpose your Content

To meet your marketing objectives, you need new marketing content all the time. How can you use existing content and re-purpose it in a different form and yet ensure that you are offering something fresh and relevant to your target market

In the marketing world today, Content is king and is also considered by many as currency. Generating fresh, relevant content to feed into your different marketing artifacts is usually a challenge. It involves significant, consistent effort and is expensive. How do you then keep generating this content to feed into your marketing plans?

The answer to the above challenge lies in re-purposing content effectively to meet your organization’s requirements. How do you go about doing this? Here are a few tips. 

1.      Converting Webinars to Whitepapers

Webinars are very popular means to engage with your potential prospects and existing customers. Creating the content for an engaging webinar takes a lot of time & effort. All the knowledge and information gathered during the creation of a webinar can be effectively re-purposed and abstracted as a white paper.  White papers are useful for targeting larger segment of audiences.

2.      Converting Whitepapers to blogs/articles

White papers discuss a variety of topics with a neutral stand-point. Sections of these topics can be used to create articles/blogs. Usually it is possible to generate at least two articles from one white paper that you generate.

3.      Converting PowerPoint presentations to fresh Blogs/Articles

Your business starts with creation of PowerPoint presentations detailing your product/services offerings. A lot of effort has been already put to make the presentations at their best. Why not leverage the effort put into a PowerPoint presentation to create a blog/article.  

4.      Re-Purposing Press-Releases for highlighting relevant content

Use a series of press releases ahead of an important event to ensure higher attention from your target customers. Every release may have a different story line, but you can link the stories together to drive your objectives

Golden Tip

Listen to blog comments or lack thereof, study web analytics, monitor social media responses to get an idea of how audiences are responding to your content propagation. Try and anticipate what the audience wants and do your best to give it to them. If responses remain poor, then you need to do self-introspection and use alternative means to interact with your target audiences

Feedback welcome

Regards, 

Atul

www.xenia-consulting.com

The definitive science of creating "EFFECTIVE Marketing Content"

For your business to be successful, you need to manage the relationships that you have with your prospects, customers and stakeholders. While managing these relationships at different levels right from a suspect stage till the contract closure stage, you will need different forms of ‘effective marketing content’.  What is this ‘Effective’ marketing content then?

Content comes in different forms and takes the shape of different marketing artifacts (e.g. Flyers, Brochures, Articles, White papers, Blogs, Website content, email newsletters, Press releases, Case studies, Customer testimonials) at different points in time. For it to be effective, it should meet the objectives and the purpose at different levels in the buying cycle.

Here are some characteristics of great & effective marketing content

1)  Compelling & Engaging

With the initial few paras/words/subject headers/abstract, it should feel compelling to go through the details included. It should engage the attention of the reader and arouse enough curiosity.

2)  Relevant & Fulfilling

Having generated the curiosity, the promised value should be delivered (fulfilled) by the content. This avoids the negative effect of disappointing the reader and also increases the chance of the content being further distributed / recommended amongst peer communities.

3)  Convenient and user friendly

Content should be simple, convenient and in an appropriate format. Content should be designed, specifically for print or for electronic views.  

How do you go about generating such kind of content then?

It takes a lot of efforts and planning, but here are some things you can do: 

1)    Research

a.  Research your target audience, who is going to consume the content

b.  Understand the objectives, that you need to achieve with the content

c.  Research your competitors to understand what they are talking about

d.  Research your target industry to look for any signs of any trends/implications developing and how these are going to be affecting your target audience.

2)   Generate content repositories and filter

a.  Gather all reference content that you feel can be re-used in some way to meet the above objectives.

b.  Do Intelligent Tagging and maintain your content repository well, so that you can get to the content that you want, when you need to.

3)   Write, Refine, Package & Publish

a.  Define your content headers and start populating content. If you keep looking at your repos, you may never be able to start. Focus on your objectives

b.  Refine content in line with the objectives

c.  Package, as appropriate for the format in which it is going to be used. Use Design effectively

d.  Publish content

Let me know your thoughts !

Atul

http://www.xenia-consulting.com/

Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090

Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686

Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting

Leveraging the 'power of four' to ensure responses to your email campaigns !

There are so many emails hitting your target customer's email box on a daily basis. Add to this the fact that most of the emails would be read/filtered using Blackberries. How do you make sure that your email gets read in this crowded INBOX. 


Here are four  things that you need to pay special attention to 
1) Subject lines - cannot be sales offers, cannot sound like promotions. Keep your subject line short, but compulsive for the person to read. An effective way may be to use references of other persons that the recipent works with or is friends with. An example could be "Re : Conversation with Bob", where Bob might be his boss at work. There are many ways to find out co-workers, thanks to social networking


2) Reference - If your subject lines are strong and thoughtful, you have successfully navigated the first step and your email has been opened. you have to incentivize the person to read through and that is your next challenge.  Build on what you used while framing the subject,build a strong reference case. Of course you cannot fake it, and you have to be genuine. An example could be " I spoke with Bob Fisher's office and was told that you would be the person responsible to discuss about improving profitability options for your company"


3) Content - Make it personal - If your target customer has gone through the first two parts, most likely he would read through the rest of the content as well. Make sure that it is short and never more than 1 or 2 paras at the most. Don't beat around the bush, make the offer relevant for the person that you are trying to reach. Answer the"Whats in it for me" syndrome. Also try and make it as personal as possible. Use customer name as often as possible in your content. 


4) Precise Next Action - Once you have gone this far, define very clearly what you want the next action to be. Offer times for a follow-up discussion rather than keeping it open to next week/next month. There should be enough in your content to fetch you a response. Just as the role of a CV is to get you a job interview, the role of effective content in point 3 above is to get you to the defined next action. 


Let me know your thoughts/feedback. 
Happy selling

Regards
Atul 

http://www.xenia-consulting.com/

Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686
Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting

Some simple mechanisms to 'retain' your customers

   Every company spends a lot of money to acquire new customers, so investing a bit more to keep them is well worth the price. It's widely acknowledged that the cost of acquiring a new customer can be upwards of five times greater than the cost of retaining an existing one. That means marketing tactics aimed at customer retention should be a priority.

One smart, effective, and efficient customer retention tactic is an integrated e-mail communications program. There are many opportunities to communicate with customers via e-mail, and e-mail fits well into the communications methods engineers and other technical professionals prefer.

To make e-mail work as a customer retention tool, you need to :

1) Get out of the promotional mindset and get into your customer's mindset. Whether they are a loyal, long-term customer or have just purchased from you for the first time, your customers want to hear from you when you have something to say that's relevant to them. They don't want to be sold to again and again. They want useful information to help them do their jobs better. This will keep your company "top of mind" with them.

2) Coordinate efforts among different departments who will use e-mail to communicate with customers. This is where the integrated part comes in. Anyone who might be sending a customer an e-mail — customer service, marketing, accounts receivable, sales — must be on the same page. Their communication efforts should be coordinated and spaced apart so that the e-mails customers receive from you are relevant and timely. There's nothing like a barrage of similar or contradictory e-mails to turn an e-mail retention program into a mess of communications that backfires and turns your customers away.

3)The key to using e-mail for customer retention is to think in terms of having conversations with your customers. Stay away from the hard selling and limited-time offers and try cultivating your relationship by providing relevant information.

Here are some examples of relevant information:

• A simple thank you e-mail for purchasing a product with links to support information or other products that are related to the one they purchased
• An e-mail with phone numbers, e-mail addresses, or links for support
• E-mails containing technical articles or links to articles about their industry or job functions
• E-mails announcing new versions of products they own
• E-mails containing customer satisfaction surveys
• An e-mail from the salesperson just "checking in" to see if the customer has any questions or needs additional help

While none of these examples are promotional in nature, several of them still perform important cross-selling and up-selling functions. E-mails on new product announcements or related products can lead to additional sales for your company. 

Happy emailing !

Thoughts & feedback welcome

Atul 

http://www.xenia-consulting.com/
Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686
Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting

6 point 'start-up checklist' before you launch into Lead Generation Programs

     A lot of my customers ask me, “What would you need from our side before you launch a lead generation program for us”. I thought this info would be useful to a larger audience, so decided to post it as a blog. Well here it is :

1) Company Brand and Messaging

  a) Be clear about what the ‘high level messaging’ of the company is going to be. Have   your boiler plates/company overview slides ready in word/powerpoint

  b) Be ready with ‘elevator pitches’ and customize them, based on the audience that you are trying to reach

  c) Have ‘calling scripts’ done and rehearsed. If you are engaging in telemarketing, you are going to get no longer than 10 secs to make a first impression. As you progress, you may or may not refer to these, but it is useful to internalize them amongst your teams.

2) Company Offerings in terms of products/services offered

   a) Have offering documents ready for what you offer in terms of products/services. These could be in the form of PDF brochures/Powerpoint presentations

   b) Make sure to incorporate “How do you do it” sections, which will give confidence to your prospective customers that you are all ready to work for their requirement.

   c) Be ready with your ‘engagement models’ and ‘commercial models’. You may not  expose them during the first interactions, but will need them pretty soon. If you do not have them ready, this will waste precious time of a warm prospect.

3) Set achievable targets from the program

   a) So that you can measure progress, analyse results.

   b) Monitor initial results and initial discussions to validate your hypothesis about the target market.

4) Have a clear plan for lead nurturing

   a) A lot of leads will move into lead nurturing programs that you will need to run for extended periods of time. Have a plan ready to continuously engage with these potential prospects that are not yet ready to do business with you.

5) Create a target prospect list and engage in primary/secondary research

   a) Cold ‘Cold calling’ will hardly achieve any results. You need to be relevant for the person/company that you are calling. Find out ‘why’ and’ how’ your products / services can be relevant for them

   b) Focus on business value to the prospective customer, not just on parameters like cost & quality.

6) Have patience – loads of it

   a) Remember that consistency pays, not individual brilliance

All the very best for your programs

Any more thoughts – feedback welcome

Regards
Atul 

http://www.xenia-consulting.com/

Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686
Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting

6 "Marketing must-haves" for your website

Organizations increasingly depend on their website as the single largest 'marketing infrastructure' tools. Here are some "must haves" for your website


1) Performance - you might design great sites, but you need to make sure that the site load time is reasonable and is not an irritant. Also you must check compatibility with common browsers. A good usability study is always an added advantage. 
2) Ease of navigation - For a visitor who comes to the site for the first time, it should be easy to get to what he is looking for. Content should be optimized for minimum scrolls and should be a mix of text and intuitive graphics. Also it should be easy for the user to download or click to get more info
3) SEO readiness - With SEO so relevant, you should make sure that you have your meta descriptions, page titles, image titles and key words well defined. 
4) Fresh content - There is nothing better than having fresh content on the site . This could be in the form of blogs, white papers, articles, PR as well as videos. 
5) Means to engage visitors - You have spend so much effort to lure visitors in. you should make sure that they stay on the site longer. There should be means to engage visitors through some innovative applications of gaming, surveys and free resources. 
6) A clear call to action (C2A) - Every page should have a clear C2A. It could be either download, subscribe, contact us etc. If they want to reach you, lets make it easier for them. 


Any thoughts/ideas. 
Suggestions welcome


Regards
Atul 

http://www.xenia-consulting.com/

Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686
Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting

Some secrets to marketing success that no one will teach you

  Several people ask me, " What are the secrets to marketing success" that we are missing out on. I pondered over this question a bit and it took me some time to pin-point specific areas for success, as every business has different requirements. The answer varied from business to business. 


Interestingly there was one point which came out very strong and i felt that it was worth mentioning. You can devise some great marketing strategies and may have some great ideas to engage with your existing and potential customers, but what is critical to success is the execution of the plans and that too with unerring consistency. Marketing operations are never managed overnight. There are initiatives and activities that you take up CONSISTENTLY  on a regular basis. 


Think about branding, lead generation, public relations, advertising, campaigns, key account management and you will realize that in all of them, consistency is more important than individual flashes of brilliance. 


Let me know your thoughts !

Atul
http://www.xenia-consulting.com/

Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686
Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting

Achieve a sales closure in every client interaction

In every client interaction, you are usually selling something. Based on you closing all these conditional sales, the client eventually gives you the coveted PO and buys your product/service.

It is important to set expectations and objectives very clearly ahead of every client interaction. A set of expectations should be set for yourself and a bit conservative estimate should be reserved for your management as well, which is usually waiting for the sales closure.

For a typical product/service sale situation, here are some sample conditional sales that a sales person will have to go through
1)Customer accepts to receive more information from you, shares his email and other information
2) Based on information sent by you, customer accepts and commits to spend more time on a more detailed conversation/meeting regarding the product/service (to understand)
3) Based on the understanding of what you offer, customer shares his current concerns, problems that he is facing and gives you an opportunity to solve his problem
4) Based on your response (RFI/RFP) or demos, customer agrees to share more data, that will make the solution more relevant to his needs
5) You submit an estimate/price proposal and gain conditional acceptance from the customer to find out if it is as per his expectations
6) Negotiate to close the gaps and eventually close the sale.

A lot of sweat and efforts will go in every step, but it is good to warm up your client in every interaction and enjoy every moment of sales success (in every conditional sales). After all closing a sale is a tough job and expecations are very high.

All the best !
Atul
http://www.xenia-consulting.com/



Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686
Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting

4 point essential marketing kit for small to medium software product companies

You have a great product idea and you have the best of technical resources to build your product, but what would be the 4 things(in marketing) that you can't miss out on,  while planning your marketing strategy?

Here are my thoughts
1) Get closer to your target market - Define your target market precisely, as narrowly as possible. You will be always tempted to keep expanding the target base, but the more precise it is, it will be easier to focus better with better messaging
2) Understand socializing habits of your target market - With social media & digital marketing offering so many options to you, you need to figure out, where your target market GOes-TO for credible information, reference information. Which are the trusted sources of information related to your product/service.
3) Get social in these forums/groups - Get involved in discussions, post updates, announcements that are relevant to the group. Build your own credibility in the group with authentic/ trusted information. Over a period of time, this loyalty will get transported to your sites/blogs/announcements/subscription lists
4) Engage with your current and potential customers - Engage with surveys, contests, mailing campaigns, announcements, article posts, blogs. Make sure that your message is valuable for your target audience. Deeper engagement will also allow you to get candid product feedback.

Any more must-haves - what do you think?
Feedback/comments most welcome

Atul
http://www.xenia-consulting.com/


Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686
Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting

Sales funnel problems ! Rejuvenate your business with focused lead nurturing programs

Marketers world-wide spend a lot of time thinking of innovative means to create/capture new leads for their business. In most cases, they are blind-folded by their sales targets and focus only on those leads that have the potential to offer immediate business opportunities and ignore the rest.

As a result of this, businesses are under continuous pressure to create new business leads, while the ones that have been created and that could have future potential are ignored. This is a classical problem faced by many. Companies build subscriber bases, opt-in marketing lists, but don't do enough to continuously and meaningfully engage with this subscriber base.

Focused lead nurturing programs offer an easy solution to these scenarios. While your sales team works on closing potential hot leads, the marketing organization or an outsourced marketing partner can focus on creating and capturing new leads and nurturing existing leads to levels, where they are ready to do business with you. This needs sustained and focused marketing efforts through a variety of customer engaging channels.  Some of the channels that are commonly used to manage this connect with your subscriber base are :
- Electronic direct mailing campaigns
- Opt-in Newsletters
- Announcements/ PR about articles/white papers being available etc.
- Generic tools/metrics/free downloads that are relevant for the customers

While you are not actively engaged with all your leads, as a business, you should make sure that when these comapnies/contacts are ready to do business with you, they have reasons and options to engage with you.

What do you think?
Suggestions/comments welcome

Atul
http://www.xenia-consulting.com/

Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686
Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting

Unlock the potential of your strategic key accounts in 4 easy steps !

Most services organizations have a significant part of their revenues coming in from a few select strategic key accounts. These accounts are nurtured over the years by salesmen, account managers, delivery personnel and receive a good share of top management attention.

Over time, many of these accounts fail to realize their true potential. Companies usually face a number of challenges as they work to build stronger relationships with its largest accounts. Sales teams are confident of their current relationships, but still fail to up-sell the company’s value and brand to expand the business as per company expectations. Sales transactions tend to get opportunistic with little planning or strategy. Marketing is typically underused, or viewed simply as a source for collateral and sales tools.


Under constant pressure to sell, Sales and Account management teams often can’t afford to devote the time necessary to plan an account strategy based on researching the larger business issues that customers face. Instead, they develop plans in relative isolation, with too much of an inward focus—the plans are based on what has already been sold to customers and assumptions about what they are most likely to buy next.

In such circumstances, what helps is a focused Key Accounts Marketing plan. Here are some steps involved
1) Identify & validate your key accounts, with an integrated sales and marketing effort, based on metrics, budgets, past performance, and future guidance.
2) Lay out an account specific plan, that includes stakeholders, influencers to be mapped, business expansions in current engagements, adjacencies to the business, detailed contact, company and industry based research to get closer to the real business issues facing the business. This also involves exploring areas that your company is not currently into, but can easily get into to satisfy potential client requirements
3) Implement and execute to the plan with detailed reviews and metrics. Laying out the plan is just the start, execution is the real challenge
4) Assess & Evaluate - Define success metrics and track these intermittently, so that you know that you are on the right track

Well this sounds easy, but takes a lot of effort. One of the services we offer (Key Accounts Marketing) is focused on making sure that our customers can truly unlock the potential of their key accounts in a planned and systematic manner.

All the very best !
Best Regards,
Atul

http://www.xenia-consulting.com/


Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686
Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting

Key ingredients of a good website

It is an all too common comment. Friends, business associates calling/writing to you and telling you that you have a good website, but,, what is a good website?

The definitions are varied and differ by individuals that you ask this question to. Some would say that well designed is well built, some will say that content is king, for some, usability is of utmost importance and of course others will say that it needs to be engaging and should have the glue to keep holding your customers and prospects. For me, defining what you want to achieve from the website would be the first step to solve this puzzle. Aiming too high or too low, both will have its own problems.

For a software product company,here are what i feel, are key ingredients of a good website
1) Engaging content with clear business value for defined categories of target consumers for the defined inward links (or home page)
2) An easy C2A (Call to Action) with minimal commitment. This will ensure that your subscriber lists swells in size and feeds into your opportunities pipe. Examples could be free downloads, free tour, trial version etc.
3) An opportunity to get into the details for the detail oriented persons (these should be sidelinks and the FAB(feature/advantage/benefit) statements should not occupy too much real estate in the premium pages (inward links or home page)
4) An easy understanding of how purchase can be made, and what does it commercially involve. Getting involved with a sales guy for every transaction can put off most visitors
5) High level of sales enablement maturity with detailed documents like data sheets, technical manuals, white papers, tips n tricks and a mature FAQ in place

With all this in, your website is ready as an infrastructure that can engage with your potential clients, the next thing you need to focus on is to drive that traffic into your website.. more later.

All the best. welcome comments and feedback
Atul

http://www.xenia-consulting.com/

Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686
Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting

Get closer to your target market for maximizing revenue potential

Working with business owners to define and identify the target markets for their product/services has always been an enjoyable exercise. One of the most important things that it involves is to take the business owner or the CEO slightly away from the idea that he owns (about his product or service) and virtually make him wear the customer’s shoes, both physically and emotionally. Getting started is not an easy task, but as time progresses, the business owners understand where the exercise is leading to and realize the value in this exercise for their business.



Here are some steps that we usually go through in such an exercise
- Understand what your product/service does and what type of customers are likely to gain from engaging
- Identifying a concise target audience for each of your products/services. The target audience for different products/services can be different, and need not be the same across the company
- Categorize and prioritize among the categories of customers that will be interested in your products/services, based on which you will start trying to get in touch with them to source business.
- Attaching yourself emotionally to the different categories within the target audience is the next step. This gives insights into what they will gain (directly/indirectly)by using your product/services.
- Based on the emotional quotient, and what your product/service stands for at its core, design your univocal branding and messaging strategy
- Choose your communication mediums and measures based on the budgets that you can outlay for this exercise
- Execute on the strategy and do not hesitate to tweak the execution, based on early feedback.


All the best and would welcome comments
Atul
http://www.xenia-consulting.com/


Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686

Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting
Working to identify target market and defining GTM are part of core service offerings from Xenia Consulting

How important are elevator pitches in B2B marketing ?

I have heard this many times over. " Whats the point of creating hype and giving elevator pitches, when you are not trying to close a sale in that conversation. Elevator pitches are sales tools used by salesmen of consumer companies." 

I would say that this is very far away from the truth. Elevator pitches are relevant and important for any kind of business, be it B2B or B2C. (For those who do not know, Elevator pitches are the kind you provide to a person, who you bounce into in an elevator accidently, but want him as a customer. It need not be delivered only in an elevator though)

According to me, elevator pitches help you put a foot in the door and give you another chance to engage with your potential prospect. It helps keep the engagement alive for a sale to happen.

I feel the following are good ground rules for a 30 seconds to 2 mins elevator pitch

• You should greet the other person well and warm the relationship quickly with any general relevancy comment
• You should deliver a power packed message in 2-3 sentences max and actively look for signs of interest (this has to be based on a hypothesis of what would be relevant for the target prospect, which needs research to be done)
• If there is interest shown, make sure that you define next steps very clearly and exit. (Send collateral, fix appointment, meet)

Elevator pitches help you achieve the first conditional sale with the customer. you are IN and need to prepare for the next conditional sale.

All the very best !
Atul
www.xenia-consulting.com
Linked IN - http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686
Twitter - https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting

Setting short term and long term goals for your marketing programs

Goals are important in every walk of life, then is Marketing different ? In fact it is all the more important that there are measurable, realistic and specific goals (both short term and long term) for your marketing efforts.

This makes sure that marketing efforts are measurable and you can attribute success or failure to an assortment of marketing efforts.Short term Goals also make sure that you can tune long term goals and expectations based on initial responses.

Some examples of short term goals
1) Spurt in website traffic, number of downloads at the website
2) Number of inquiries for targeted campaigns (print/digital/social)

Some examples of long term goals
1) Website rankings and search engine ratings - should rate among the top few
2) Sales conversion rate - predictability should improve with sustained marketing efforts
3) Trusted source of reliable information - Sustained marketing should start projecting you as a thought leader in your segment and over a period of time, people should accept you as a trusted source of reliable information

Many business owners find it difficult to set realistic goals and even more difficult to give an honest evaluation of their business’ performance against those goals. It is essential that you do both of these things to succeed.
 Set your goals, measure your success against those goals and you will be way ahead of the game. More on this later.

Marketing outsourcing - some debates

Marketing & Sales are core functions of an organization. How can you ever think of outsourcing these functions?  Isn't this a common argument that you hear time and time again? . Even while saying so, companies will go about appointing channel networks, business associates, commission partners, who will sell on behalf of the company and help meet sales targets. Also on the marketing side, several elements of the investor relations, marketing communication, design and branding operations will continue to be outsourced to specialist companies in the domain.

Marketing strategy certainly is a core element of the business strategy and you would certainly not want your competitors to know what you are upto. But more important than laying down the strategy is to execute it to perfection to be able to realize the results. My feelings are that companies can take external help from marketing experts in both the strategy formulation as well as the operations rollout, thereby reducing the load on internal staff and resources (budgets, time etc.)

So what exactly can be outsourced and how can it be done. Lots to be thinking about. More about it in upcoming blogs

Marketing Outsourcing - a viable option

The economy seems to be getting back to normalcy, slowly and surely. Amidst all the mayhem that companies unleashed during the lean period, all the major cost centers and support operations suffered. Marketing, which is still considered as a cost center by many, though it is an important growth engine was one among them. With companies beginning to figure their way forward to get back to growing ways, the focus shifts back to marketing in a big way.


What's a better option, hire and re-train a new marketing team all over or hire specialists in their own function and start outsourcing marketing operations. The answers are varied in different business circumstances. I was studying the merits and de-merits of both the options, . I will share more during the coming blogs.