Staying ahead of the curve is essential for long-term success for any business. One of the most effective strategies for achieving this can be outsourcing marketing. Outsourced marketing services have proven to be a game-changer for companies seeking to reach their full potential. 

Let's delve into the world of outsourced marketing, explore how it can benefit your business, and discuss when it's the right time to consider this approach.

Understand Outsourced Marketing

Outsource marketing, also known as outsourcing marketing, involves delegating various marketing functions and tasks to external experts or agencies. These specialists work collaboratively with your business to develop and execute marketing strategies and campaigns that drive growth and achieve specific goals. This can include both digital and non-digital marketing. 

The big question – to outsource or not to outsource? 

When your internal teams are operating at full capacity and your in-house resources are stretched thin, staying ahead in the competitive market can be challenging. Time limitations, budget constraints, and even complacency often lead even the most skilled marketers to revert to well-worn tactics. Relying solely on the familiar will only take you part of the way.

However, for marketing to truly make an impact, it must be innovative and captivating. Outsourcing marketing tasks can provide significant relief from various operational pressures your team may be grappling with and enable you to execute impactful campaigns successfully with specialized third-party providers. Outsourcing marketing with a market expert like Exela can help you get ahead in the competition. Outsourcing links you with marketing agencies that specialize in staying ahead of the curve when it comes to new technologies and trends. 

The Benefits of Outsourcing Marketing

Access to Expertise - When you outsource marketing, you gain access to a team of professionals who specialize in various aspects of marketing, such as SEO, content marketing, social media management, and PPC advertising. These experts bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table, ensuring that your marketing efforts are well-informed and effective.

Cost-Efficiency - Hiring an in-house marketing team can be costly, as it involves recruiting, training, and providing ongoing salaries and benefits. In contrast, outsourcing marketing services often prove more cost-effective. You pay for the specific services you need, eliminating the overhead associated with full-time employees.

Scalability - Outsourced marketing services are highly adaptable. As your business grows or encounters changing marketing needs, you can easily scale your outsourced team up or down. This flexibility allows you to stay agile and responsive in a dynamic business environment.

Focus on Core Competencies - Outsourcing marketing enables your business to concentrate on what it does best – developing and delivering products or services. You can delegate marketing responsibilities to experts, freeing up your internal resources to focus on core competencies and strategic initiatives.

You Get More with Experts - Outsourcing with an expert like Exela, can help you get more done. Exela’s offerings encompass marketing technology and services that span print and promotional item management, strategic sourcing, creative design services, marketing campaign assistance, omni-channel communication, and cutting-edge data analytics. 

Stay Current with Trends - The marketing landscape is constantly evolving, with new technologies, platforms, and trends emerging regularly. Outsourced marketing agencies are dedicated to staying up-to-date with the latest industry developments. By outsourcing, you ensure that your marketing strategies remain current and effective.

When to Consider Outsourcing Marketing

Now that we've explored the benefits of outsourced marketing, let's discuss when it's the right time for your business to consider this approach:

Desire for Innovation: Outsourced marketing agencies often bring fresh perspectives and innovative ideas to the table, helping your business stay competitive and creative in its marketing efforts.

Limited Internal Expertise: If your internal marketing team lacks expertise in certain areas critical to your marketing strategy, outsourcing can fill these gaps effectively.

Seasonal Campaigns: For businesses that run seasonal marketing campaigns, outsourcing allows you to access specialized skills for the duration of your campaign, without the long-term commitment of hiring additional staff.

Rapid Growth: When your business experiences rapid growth, it may be challenging to scale your internal marketing team quickly. Outsourcing can provide the necessary resources to keep up with demand.

Cost Constraints: If you're operating under budget constraints, outsourcing marketing services can be a cost-effective alternative to hiring full-time employees.

Outsource marketing is a powerful tool for businesses seeking to reach their full potential in today's competitive landscape. It offers access to expertise, cost-efficiency, scalability, and the ability to focus on core competencies. When the time is right and when done with experts, outsourcing marketing services can propel your business toward greater success, ensuring you stay ahead of the curve in the ever-evolving marketing world. 

Are you considering outsourcing marketing? Get in touch with us, and our experts can guide you. 

Maintaining a strong presence across multiple locations is essential for many companies, but it is also fraught with challenges. Executing an effective multi-location marketing strategy requires consistent messaging, streamlined processes, and efficient marketing fulfillment to ensure a cohesive brand experience across all locations.

Multi-location marketing is the practice of implementing marketing strategies across various physical locations or branches of a business. It involves tailoring marketing efforts to meet the unique needs and preferences of each location's target audience while maintaining a consistent brand identity and message. It sounds easy enough but between disparate systems, varying brand guidelines, and lack of visibility into fulfillment management, each business location has its own unique obstacles to overcome.

The Importance of Consistency in Multi-Location Marketing

Consistency is the foundation of successful multi-location marketing. It helps build trust, strengthens brand recognition, and ensures a unified customer experience. When customers encounter consistent branding and messaging across different locations, it fosters a sense of familiarity and reliability. Consistency also prevents confusion and maintains brand integrity, allowing your business to make a lasting impression.

Maintaining consistency in a multi-location marketing strategy can be a daunting task. Challenges may include variations in local demographics, cultural differences, language barriers, and operational disparities between locations, to start. These factors can result in inconsistent messaging, disjointed campaigns, and a diluted brand image.

At the same time, companies frequently use multiple services and platforms for their fulfillment and marketing needs, creating confusion and time-consuming processes. Many of these systems may not enable visibility into promotional items across locations, creating another challenge as one location may have an overflowing stock of promotional materials whereas another may be consistently out of stock. This results in increased spending, missed marketing opportunities, and a lack of cohesion between locations.

The Role of Marketing Fulfillment

Marketing fulfillment involves managing the production, storage, and distribution of marketing materials across all locations. It’s a critical component of multi-location marketing that helps streamline processes and provide consistency. Here's how marketing fulfillment can help you stay consistent:

Centralized Brand Control

A marketing fulfillment system like Exela’s Marketing Execution (XME) platform allows you to maintain centralized control over your brand assets, ensuring that all marketing materials adhere to your brand guidelines. From printed collateral such as transaction documents to digital assets such as emails, a centralized platform enables easy access, updates, and distribution of materials to all locations.

Customization for Local Needs

While maintaining consistency, marketing fulfillment solutions also allow for localization. By tailoring certain elements of your marketing materials to specific locations, such as incorporating regional references or adjusting language, you can resonate better with local audiences while preserving the overall brand message.

Timely Delivery

Marketing fulfillment streamlines the distribution process, ensuring quick delivery of marketing materials to each location. This eliminates delays and prevents situations where locations may resort to creating their own materials, resulting in inconsistent branding.

Data-Driven Insights

Marketing fulfillment systems often provide valuable data and analytics, enabling you to track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns across different locations. These insights help you make data-driven decisions, optimize your strategies, and identify areas where consistency can be improved. Using AI in your marketing strategy can be a game-changer.

Best Practices for Multi-Location Marketing Consistency

To maintain consistency in your multi-location marketing strategy, consider the following best practices:

Develop Clear Brand Guidelines: Clearly define your brand identity, values, and guidelines to ensure a consistent message across all locations.

Provide Comprehensive Training: Educate your marketing teams and employees at each location about the brand guidelines, messaging, and marketing objectives to reinforce consistency.

Regular Communication: Foster open lines of communication with your marketing teams at each location to address questions, share updates, and gather feedback.

Use Technology Solutions: Leverage marketing fulfillment platforms that offer centralized control, customization options, and data-driven insights to streamline processes and maintain consistency.

Finding the Right Marketing Execution Platform

A key component to ensuring consistency across locations is the use of technology. Exela’s XME platform offers just that and more. Exela is uniquely positioned as a single-source provider of end-to-end marketing solutions. We make your marketing objectives our own and execute your vision, while maximizing cost savings and operational flexibility. With our collaborative and flexible approach, we customize each marketing solution to your needs.

Our XME web storefront is the premier platform for creating and managing cross-media campaigns. The customizable, white-label (client-branded) version of our platform acts as your company’s own e-commerce storefront for internal purchasing and procurement, promotional items, brand management, and spend control. We offer flexible and scalable promotional item sourcing services that optimize your supply chains and provide the highest value of material while enabling cost savings strategies.

XME also offers the ultimate destination for all-encompassing marketing solutions, including top-notch transactional document control. On any invoice, bill, or statement, we help provide the right targeted messaging to your customers. Collaborate with our team of seasoned experts who are dedicated to bringing your vision to life to achieve remarkable flexibility and unprecedented cost savings.

From static to variable data print, inventory items to packaging, emails to text messages, and personalized URLs to social media, our XME platform drives sophisticated print and electronic campaigns from inception to launch and beyond.

Take it a step further by combining XME with our business intelligence platform, Brand Intel, to perform advanced AI-powered market research. Brand Intel extracts valuable business data insights across the web, giving you the tools to perform competitor analysis, streamline reputation management, and gain potential customer insights.
 

Keep Your Multi-Location Marketing Consistent with Exela

Consistency is the cornerstone of a successful multi-location marketing strategy. By leveraging Exela’s XME solution and following best practices, you can ensure that your brand messaging remains consistent across all locations, resulting in cost savings, a unified customer experience, improved brand recognition, and increased customer loyalty. Discover how XME can transform your multi-location marketing strategy today!

When thinking about marketing you may first think of social media, Google Ads, email, or text messages. These are all components of digital marketing, the main marketing focus of the majority of businesses. However, before the internet became as ubiquitous as it is today, businesses implemented traditional marketing; that is, marketing that was completely offline. This includes TV ads, mailers, print ads, or even billboards.

For many companies, traditional marketing is still used, but sparingly. Traditional marketing still has its uses even today, or maybe we should say, especially today, with the digital clutter we're constantly seeing. With hundreds of email campaigns arriving in our inboxes daily, this may be why marketers are expecting an increase in traditional marketing, according to Harvard Business Review. Even though businesses still rely heavily on digital marketing, traditional marketing shouldn't be neglected as it allows you to diversify your marketing efforts and reach a larger audience.

What Traditional Marketing Looks Like Today 

Traditional marketing hasn’t changed much in these last several decades. We're still seeing radio ads, print ads, brochures, and even flyers posted inside buildings. Surprisingly, traditional ads are experiencing increased engagement, with more than half of consumers reading the print advertisements they receive from companies they like. Research by Ebiquity shows that traditional media channels such as TV, radio, and print outperform digital channels when it comes to reach, attention, and engagement relative to cost. 

While the majority of marketing spend is still going toward digital marketing due to its ability to reach a wide audience while providing database analytics, we may start to see a shift soon. With Google's plan to phase out the third-party cookie system on Chrome browsers by late 2023, marketers may no longer be able to rely on third-party cookies, which have been invaluable in tracking website visitors and collecting data on search preferences to create more personalized ads. Combine that with the increasing cost of digital marketing and traditional marketing starts to look more appealing.

Traditional Marketing: Benefits and Disadvantages

When implementing traditional marketing into your strategy it's important to keep in mind the pros and cons of the approach. This way you can create a more robust strategy that uses traditional marketing advantages to your benefit while keeping in mind the potential downfalls.

Benefits

Traditional advertising allows you to have a presence almost anywhere you’d like. With traditional advertising, consumers can see your ads in the comfort of their own home, while they're out running errands, or on their drive to work. If you happen to know the location of your intended audience (i.e., a certain part of town or a specific neighborhood), you can use traditional marketing to reach them. 

Because of the digital clutter we're experiencing today, traditional ads can stand out more and, in some cases, they're very difficult to ignore – such as billboards. Another example is radio ads and TV ads where people are unable to skip the ad itself in order to continue listening to or watching that channel. 

Customers trust traditional marketing more than digital marketing. With so many sketchy websites and scam emails and text messages, consumers may trust print advertising more than what they see on a phone or computer screen. According to Harvard Business Review, 82% of customers trust most print advertising, 80% trust television advertising, 76% trust direct mail advertising, and 71% trust radio advertising. When you compare that to 64% who trust ads on social networks and 67% who trust online video ads, it's clear that traditional marketing still has an impact on consumers.

Disadvantages

One of the major disadvantages of traditional marketing is that businesses are unable to interact with their consumers. This is very different from digital marketing, where consumers can send messages or even reply to emails. In our digital world, we’re constantly connected and able to see how the audience responds to our messaging. With traditional marketing, businesses don’t see how consumers react. This leads to the next point. 

Traditional advertising doesn't offer any data or analytics for you to assess after each campaign. Often this means that you may not be able to tell which ads worked and which didn't. Unlike with digital marketing, where you can do split testing, traditional marketing makes it more difficult to learn if the message really resonated with your intended audience.

Traditional marketing can be more expensive than digital marketing. Rates for traditional marketing spaces tend to be pricier, especially if you want to showcase an ad in a more popular magazine or during popular TV coverage times. Not to mention that the rate of designing, printing, and mailing a brochure or an advertisement may be more expensive than, say, sending an email or text message.

Creating an Integrated Marketing Strategy 

To remain competitive, businesses need to create an integrated marketing strategy that uses both digital and traditional marketing to make the most out of their efforts. Some examples of this include print advertising that suggests consumers visit a website or has a QR code to scan. This provides the benefit of print marketing while also taking advantage of the data analytics from digital marketing based on how many people visit the link or scan the QR code.

One way to create an effective integrated marketing strategy is to rely on a marketing solution such as Exela’s Marketing Execution Services (XME). This solution combines traditional marketing with digital marketing to give you the best of both worlds. Using detailed reports and analytics along with predictive marketing automation, you can get a better idea of how to improve your outreach and create more targeted messages for your consumers.

Keep Traditional Marketing in Mind

As you plan your marketing strategy for the new year, consider what traditional marketing may have to offer for your company and in what ways you can integrate it into your marketing strategy. Whether it's through using a solution like Exela’s XME or finding your own way to increase your efforts using traditional marketing, make sure you don't forget about the benefits of using non-digital marketing.

Whether you’re a small business or a multinational company, effectively marketing your products and services is essential to success. Building and managing your company’s brand is essential to creating a solid reputation, and a great way to differentiate from the competition.

Should something deemed so crucial to the success or failure of your business be taken care of in-house - even if marketing doesn’t really align with your core business? For some companies this is a workable solution. But many others opt to outsource all or part of their marketing efforts to a business process outsourcing company. Here are some of the key reasons your might want to consider this option:

Specialization in Marketing Services

Quality marketing takes a lot of time, energy, and experience. Developing marketing strategies, finalizing communication tone, targeting the right audience, and monitoring campaign success are all big undertakings, and can leave small in-house teams overwhelmed and overextended, resulting in poor quality materials and unsatisfactory results.

By outsourcing marketing, you can tap the talents and experience of a team that specializes in marketing. With years of experience in running campaigns, managing social media handles, branding products and services, and a lot more - they already have the right knowledge and specialized team to assist you with your marketing requirements.

Streamline Marketing Workflow

Marketing often requires a lot more maintenance and administration than one might at first assume. Many in-house marketing teams struggle to keep up with the needs and expectations of a wide variety of internal stakeholders while working with limited bandwidth. Between creating and running new campaigns, producing collateral to support sales, writing website copy, managing social channels, and a whole host of other requests, marketing teams can quickly get pulled in many different directions. Outsourcing marketing activities is a great way to streamline your efforts and keep management and administration simple while still benefiting from quality marketing materials.

Strategic Sourcing

An important but easy to overlook factor in determining marketing spend is how you source critical materials to create your marketing assets. Seeking out and securing the best items at the right price point can quickly overwhelm in-house teams, especially if they don’t have an existing network of trusted vendors they can tap. Marketing services companies often specialize in identifying the necessary promotional items and sourcing them in a way that is flexible and scalable, helping control costs while delivering quality marketing products. Learn more about Exela's Strategic Sourcing solution. 

Cost Savings by Outsourcing Marketing

While you may think of marketing mainly in terms of short-term campaigns, it can actually add significant long-term overhead costs to your budget. One of the biggest expenses of building an in-house marketing team is hiring and employing skilled workers - a task that can also be very time-consuming. By outsourcing marketing, you can partner with a ready-made team of qualified experts. You also don’t have to invest in industry tools or spend time building relationships with media outlets or marketing materials suppliers.

Plus, by leveraging the marketing service provider’s expertise and experience, you can shorten the learning curve and hit the ground running with more successful campaigns. A good marketing services company will already be tracking market trends and be prepared to conduct necessary research to create impactful campaigns right away.

Marketing Tracking and Analytics

Measuring and tracking the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and applying the insights gained to increase success rates is an important, if complicated, step in the marketing process. It can also add a lot of strain on in-house marketing teams. Many third-party marketing services offer powerful analytics tools and years of industry experience that they can leverage to make sense of the data and translate insights into actionable strategies.

Learn more about how partnering with a Marketing Execution Services provider like Exela can benefit your business.

Keeping up with market trends while driving customer interest is a challenge for many marketing teams. For small businesses and multinational corporations alike, maintaining an agile marketing strategy can seem like a daunting task.

Having a smart and reliable marketing platform can make all the difference.

A marketing platform combines tools with technology capabilities to better analyze and manage daily marketing activities. Modern tools utilize technology to forecast, analyze performance for campaigns, help strategize and to make more informed decisions.

But the sheer number of platforms available can make selecting a rather difficult choice - so here’s what you should look for in a marketing platform:

Automation Tools

Business automation tools are making it easier than ever to streamline processes and improve productivity, which can be immensely useful in marketing. While the term “automation” likely brings to mind rows of robotic arms on an assembly line, automation is just as prevalent and useful in handling digital tasks, through robotic process automation (RPA) tools. These digital “bots” are ideal for handling repetitive, rules-based tasks - from simple things like retrieving data from a database to more complex tasks like analyzing customer data or automatically initiating a customer retention campaign.

A marketing platform that integrates these types of automation options is great for lean teams, and can help you implement an agile strategy with fewer resources. By automating high-volume, time-intensive tasks, you can not only get them accomplished more quickly and accurately, but also free up your staff to focus on higher-value creative tasks.

Omni-Channel Campaign Management

There are more ways to reach audiences than ever before, and modern marketing strategies need to take advantage of all of them in the most effective ways possible. While every platform may require unique messaging or cadence, the best marketing campaigns are able to span across multiple media to create a cohesive and recognizable experience, with each touchpoint reinforcing the others.

A quality marketing platform will allow you to manage broad, multimedia campaigns from one centralized hub. From email and SMS messages, to landing pages and social media content, to old school print and direct mail materials, everything should be accounted for under one platform. Look for an option that incorporates not only omni-channel delivery, but response options, and that provides performance reporting to help you identify what’s working and what needs to be adjusted.

A single sign-on gives you access to list and template management, materials management, omni-channel delivery options, manual and automated response tools, and campaign spend and performance reporting.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Your company's relationships and interactions with customers are crucial, and a CRM gives you greater flexibility and control over these interactions, while also enabling you to extract insights that can help you continually improve your services. This can make for an invaluable piece of your overall marketing strategy, helping you identify key drivers of customer behavior and tailor messaging to the highest-value needs. The system helps companies maintain steady and defined connection with customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability in the long run.

This can be as simple as setting up email sequences to reach out to your customers at defined days and time. This improves your customers' experience with your brand while giving you more time to focus on other tasks. With many marketing solutions and marketing platforms, CRM is usually included.

Cost, Plans, and Ease of Use

The next important factor is considering how user-friendly the platform is to use and navigate through. The platforms mostly offer free trials so users can go through and understand the abilities and if it is the right fit. You should consider the features, limitations of the platforms, ease of use, and reporting and analytics aspects.

Beyond this, you should also consider customer service. In the long run, you don't want to be stuck with a company that doesn't work quickly to resolve your issues.

A marketing platform is a solution that supports various functions within the realm of marketing, giving you a bird-eye view and greater control of every aspect. Exela’s Marketing Automation Solution gives you the ability to better manage your digital front and have greater control, while growing your customer base and business.