The life of a marketing manager isn’t always smooth sailing. In fact, they face challenges from all sides that require careful navigation, strategic thinking and creative solutions. But there are ways to alleviate their burden and help them to deliver exceptional results every time, and those solutions can be found in the world of marketing-as-a-service (MaaS). Keep reading and all will be revealed.
Challenge 1: Bridging the skills gap
One of the most common challenges marketing managers face is a shortage of skills and experience within their teams. One survey found that only 28% of marketers view their in-house teams as adequately trained and working well. Things change quickly in the marketing world and requirements evolve as new tools, channels and tactics emerge and old ones become outdated. This makes it especially tricky to maintain the necessary level of expertise within an in-house team.
This is where a MaaS agency can really shine, however, if it has a diverse range of skills on offer (and they should). From SEO to data analytics, social media management to content creation, a marketing-as-a-service agency should have talent across all the various marketing niches from which it can draw. By leveraging their expertise, marketing managers can augment the skills and specialized knowledge missing from their teams.
Challenge 2: Mastering the balance of campaign planning and execution
To run multiple campaigns while planning new ones can be very demanding. It requires some serious juggling to ensure everything is running smoothly and that future campaigns are properly planned out. The pressure to continuously maintain consistent levels of engagement and deliver ROI can lead to mistakes, inadequate planning and burnout.
Enter the MaaS agency. A core part of their mandate is to support businesses with additional capacity as they require it. An agency worth its salt will be adept at handling multiple projects simultaneously, with streamlined processes and experienced personnel to manage the intricacies of campaign execution and planning.
Challenge 3: Aligning with executives and demonstrating results
It isn’t always easy to demonstrate the ROI of a marketing campaign or to align with executives’ expectations. In fact, it can be a nightmare. Marketing managers face the constant pressure to show measurable results, even when a campaign’s effectiveness is difficult to prove (i.e. growing brand awareness).
This is something that a decent MaaS agency should be well-versed in and more than capable of doing. They should be experienced in using cutting-edge data analytics and advanced tools to show just how far a brand’s message has reached and what impact it had, as well as aligning with overall business objectives. They’ll know which metrics matter most and maintain transparency, helping marketing managers to demonstrate tangible results to executives.
Challenge 4: Keeping up with new trends and technologies
As mentioned above, marketing doesn’t stand still, especially digital marketing. Professionals must stay ahead of the curve to deliver the best possible results, but that puts a huge amount of pressure on an in-house team that is forever bogged down in the day-to-day demands of their profession. Learning about new tactics and tools takes time and energy that often just isn’t available.
A decent MaaS agency will have its finger on the pulse and be ready to adopt new technologies and new ways of doing things. They’ll have the resources to experiment and test things before implementing them, and they’ll know which technologies are worth integrating into campaigns.
The outsourcing solution
The concept of “doing more with less” can only go so far before productivity begins to suffer. Agile marketing-as-a-service agencies offer a solution that allows marketing managers and their teams to focus on their core competencies and overarching strategies. The marketing-as-a-service model frees up time and mental energy to enable marketing managers to be more creative, strategic, innovative and effective.
Such agencies are redefining the art of marketing management, bringing unprecedented agility and solving the problems that have long kept marketing managers awake at night. If you would like to partner with such an agency, look no further than CODESM.
