Outsource marketing

Outsourcing has been a growing area for business. It is primarily associated with ‘support functions’ such as IT, HR or Accounting. Marketing outsourcing, whilst common in the US, has not yet been embraced by British industry, but the economic downturn means that many businesses may well look to this form of cost reduction.^[1]

Outsource marketing is the art of handing over the entire marketing demands of a company to a third party. This offers three distinct benefits:

Firstly companies can access higher quality talent that they might ordinarily be able to attract into an in-house department.

Secondly, outsourcing negates the need for an in-house team, thus reducing overhead – clients can literally operate with a bare bones marketing team, or even none at all.

Thirdly, outsourcing reduces or eliminates the need for multiple, biased specialist agencies – all the marketing requirements are catered for by one centralised agency offering media-neutral and discipline-neutral marketing.

Businesses and Brands can achieve all of these benefits with the added bonus of flexibility (up-weighting or downscaling the requirements at any point), which suits the uncertainty of the economic environment.

Marketing outsourcing should not be confused with sales outsourcing or working with a contract sales organization.

The challenging economic backdrop has meant that major corporations have begun outsourcing significant parts of their marketing. For instance, the Guardian newspaper outsourced most of their marketing design in May 2010.^[2]