Never Skip a Beat – Marketing Automation Outsourcing in 2019
The Stress of Everyday Marketing
If you’re a marketing leader who knows the value of a robust Marketing Automation strategy, you likely face the following challenges everyday.
- Driving new revenue
- Proving your programs are working
- Fighting for budget
- Trying to keep your team in place
While all of these items are stressors for top marketing leaders, the last one creates particular panic around in-house Marketing Automation resources. Most marketing teams are crunched for headcount budget even though they have growing demands. From marketing strategy, demand generation, content strategy, SEO/SEM, data, and social media – marketing teams are getting larger as specialization is needed to drive successful marketing programs. However, losing your Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) lead, can grind a well-oiled team to a halt.
The Lynchpin
Often coined as a lynchpin role, the Marketing Automation lead has configured the platform to handle everything from outbound, inbound, sales enablement, and customer loyalty campaigns. Assuming you’ve built out a holistic end-to-end customer journey, the Marketing Automation platform sits in the middle of everything. Even if you’re predominantly focused on demand generation today, all of these campaigns are hitting the platform and losing that person will impact you.
The number one inbound request we get is from companies who have lost their internal MAP lead. Right behind that are companies that have lost or fired their freelance MAP consultant. While freelancing can work well, we’re seeing increased interest in partnering with a company, not an individual, when it comes to Marketing Automation outsourcing.
A New Way
Thankfully there are options to enable continuity in your marketing team, and keep that critical Marketing Automation platform spinning even if you lose people. The following services are provided by Goose Digital to extend your team and smooth out the impact of inevitable resource churn. If you are already using an agency, you can ask if they’ll offer similar models.
- Platform Launch – 35 point implementation plans that ensure nothing is missed and everything is fully documented allowing someone else to support it.
- Platform Revive – Using a similar implementation plan, audit and re-document everything, find problems, and clean up the system.
- Platform Success Retainer – Regular monthly support agreements where our team participates side-by-side with your team. Together we build out campaigns, inject strategic ideas, and maintain your platform. This is a cost effective way to move non-strategic tasks off your team, but also creates a ‘life line’ where our team can step in and shoulder larger tasks if your resources are away on vacation or leave. These include SLAs for response times, skill sets, escalations, monitoring, and reporting.
The common approach that marketing teams have taken around outsourcing of Marketing Automation duties has been largely on a campaign or task basis (ie. as-needed hourly support). We address this as well with Platform Success Plans that are pre-paid blocks of hours that you can apply to your Marketing Automation needs.
However, we are seeing more and more marketing teams request a Platform Success Retainer – probably so their stress levels can be a little lower!
If you’re interested in learning more about our services plans, please contact us.