In or out? Choosing between in-house or outsourced marketing

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Marketing is a diverse and complex portfolio of activities comprised of multiple skill sets that ensure every part of a brand’s marketing strategy is aligned and managed correctly. It’s an orchestra of digital, social, copy, content, platform, email, print, and in-person activations and operations that must come together to deliver a symphony of branding. Without the right skills or expertise, without the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) as conductor, the business runs the risk of a fragmented and discordant marketing effort that costs money but fails to deliver value.

This introduces one very simple question: Can marketing and budgets fundamentally change if resources are in-house or outsourced?

There are pros and cons for both.

In-house: The advantages

In-house marketing offers one immediate benefit – it’s a dedicated resource on tap, designed to deliver precisely what’s needed when it’s needed to whoever needs it. Marketing is high-pressure and fast-paced, so having a dedicated team ready to meet incredibly tight deadlines is invaluable.

With in-house employees, you also get a specific team that you’ve chosen. You’ve spent time selecting their talents and skill sets, ensuring that they fit within the business culture, and you’ve hand-picked them from hundreds (if not thousands) of applicants. Right here, sitting in your office is a solid stable of people who want to be there and who are committed to your brand.

Speaking of the brand – in-house people should also be immersed in your brand. They should know what language is allowed, what styles to use and when, and how to cross every t and dot every i as outlined by the brand style guide.

Another challenge, particularly now, is the lack of skills. Talent has become a commodity as skilled marketing professionals change roles, move country and reshape their lives in the wake of the pandemic. Finding and retaining the right people has become a full-time challenge, and there is the growing gap between skills in the market and skills development. Fresh talent is available but lacks the expertise that marketing teams need to fully realise their campaigns and potential, and requires a lot more time and training. Then, as pointed out in a recent article by Marketing Week, digital skills are shrinking which is causing intense pressure on marketing to get results with limited resources.

In-house: The Disadvantages

When you’ve got people in-house, you’ve also got their problems and regulated employment expectations. Your team will often be fractured by sick leave, paid holidays, training, maternity leave, paternity leave, and other similar events or occurrences. Employees are entitled to these benefits, even when a massive deadline is looming.

In-house marketing teams will cost you a lot of money regularly. You have to pay for their benefits and salary packages, which can scale significantly depending on their levels of expertise and how in-demand their skills may be, and you have to pay for their hiring and recruitment. You will also need to cover their onboarding costs, work assets such as laptops and mobile devices, and their bonuses. Plus, as you promote, you have to replace, so you’ll have to go back to recruitment and hiring to fill spaces that people leave behind, which adds that cost back onto your budget.

According to benchmarking data from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the average cost of hiring a new person is nearly $4,700. If you’re hiring for a role that pays $60,000, you will potentially spend as much as $180,000 or more. You’ll also have to repeat this cost if they don’t work out and leave within a few months…

Also, you have to ensure that every employee is made to feel a part of the company culture and that they have clearly defined key performance indicators (KPIs) and performance reviews, so they feel like they have a clear career pathway. People need benchmarks and clear reporting lines, and stable management of expectations.

Outsourced Marketing: The Advantages

An external marketing agency will have all these skills, all these experts and marketing professionals on hand whenever you need them. A third-party marketing service provider can not only fill skills gaps that your organization may not be able to fill, but they can take on work across multiple skill levels so that your teams don’t have to. This can considerably lower the cost to company in terms of hiring highly skilled marketing professionals while making it extremely easy for you to simply grab expertise when you need it. Outsourced is essentially expertise on tap.

Outsourced marketing comes with no sick leave, no maternity leave, no salary packages, or concerns around cultural fits. It doesn’t have expectations around KPIs or management, it doesn’t ask that you provide consistent training, and it doesn’t expect your teams to operate at half capacity on large campaigns because people are away or sick. You have a trusted resource committed to ensuring that you always have talent whenever you need it. The problems of staff management and wellbeing aren’t yours anymore.

You’re guaranteed market-leading solutions, technologies, and approaches when you work with an external marketing agency. To stay competitive in a very challenging market, external marketing companies make it their business to know the business of marketing. They are on top of the trends shaping customer interactions and behaviors and ensure your campaigns take advantage of them (where relevant), so you’re also ahead of the pack.

You can say goodbye to the stressors of training and development, complex relationships, overtime and KPIs, limited team functionality, and the costs of hiring, keeping, and managing talent. Outsourced marketing has it all for you PLUS:

  • The ability to embark on multiple campaigns across multiple touchpoints and markets while ensuring cohesion and consistency
  • The ability to create campaigns on demand, at speed, and on time
  • The ability to project manage campaigns, so you have more time to focus on creatives, approvals, and marketing strategy
  • The ability to deliver internal resources relevant to different markets, campaigns, and media on demand
  • The ability to flex and adapt to your changing needs while adding in reliable expertise and support that brings fresh insights and remarkable talent to your table

Outsourced Marketing: The Disadvantages

Outsourced marketing isn’t perfect – no solution really is – so it does come with some of its own issues. The first is the teething period, where both agency and company get to know one another. Agency talent will still have to learn the brand and its guidelines and spend time with the brand to ensure that campaigns and messaging are correctly aligned. While this also applies to new hires as they learn the brand, with an agency, the learning curve is everyone all at once.

Talent can cycle through the agency, so you may not always have the same people working on your account. This is a mixed blessing as it can introduce the risk of someone getting the brand wrong, but it can also bring fresh insights and perspectives that keep the campaigns and the team fresh.

Of course, you can opt into a hybrid blend of outsourced and in-house marketing. This is time intensive for you as a CMO, as you’ll have to juggle two sets of expectations across multiple teams. Still, it does ensure that you fill gaps around approvals or campaign management that balance some of the disadvantages of both types of marketing team.

Either way, outsourced marketing is an invaluable asset to any business wanting to cut costs, save time, improve efficiencies and revitalize its campaigns.

Discover the value of outsourced skills and marketing expertise with GROW

Laguna Innovation redefines communication with GROW

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Challenge

Laguna Innovation required expert support and guidance in developing its business plan, investor presentation, financial model framework, and ongoing content and marketing expertise to refine and develop its website, brochures, and product deck. The company had limited on-site resources and needed a safe pair of expert hands to help it navigate the creation of these essential materials to attract investors, cement partnerships, and drive market opportunity.

Solution

Laguna Innovation collaborated with GROW to create a comprehensive digital portfolio of presentations and frameworks to meet demanding market and investor expectations. Included within the portfolio was:

  • A business plan: Finely tuned and curated to meet very specific investor and market expectations, the business plan developed by GROW leveraged the unique sustainability and green credentials on offer from Laguna Innovation to create a strategic outline that’s both relevant and insightful. GROW ensured that the plan highlighted the company’s key selling points while showcasing its growth potential.
  • Investor presentation. The presentation included relevant statistics, insights, research, methodologies, and business strategies. Designed using customized graphics, colors, and imagery, the presentation unpacked the Laguna Innovation business proposition in an engaging format. GROW ensured that it included the information and insights investors expect from a high-level presentation.
  • Content development. GROW leveraged its extensive content and marketing development expertise to design, write and launch marketing materials for Laguna Innovation. The team ensured that the color palette translated across the different media and that the content matched the company’s tone, style, and brand identity. The final marketing toolkit delivered to Laguna Innovation included a website, brochure, and client and investor decks.

Results

Developed on WordPress, laid out in an easy-to-read and navigate format, and designed to be easy to update, the new Laguna Innovation website delivered precisely what the customer needed. The sustainability element was the golden thread carefully curated throughout all materials – from the business plan through to the brochures – and emphasized by the right font, color palette, copy, and graphical elements. The copy, design, and development process were smooth, and the final product was relevant and engaging. The company now has a highly visual and appealing website that it can easily update to keep it fresh and vibrant and that captures the full range of the company’s services and solutions.

Testimonial

“The GROW team understood exactly what we needed to ensure that our brand and business model were accurately conveyed and carried throughout our marketing and business materials. Working with them was effortless, and we will continue working with them well into the future.”

Clive Lipchin, CEO and Co-Founder at Laguna Innovation.

The golden highway: Orchestrating the perfect customer journey

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According to McKinsey research, the business can increase its revenue by up to 7% and its profitability by up to 2% with transformed customer experiences.  The firm also found that customer satisfaction was directly connected to the customer journey, especially if the marketing team looks along the entire golden pathway to ensure that every step taken by a customer is smooth and seamless.

It is a sentiment echoed by Gartner, however, from the other side of the customer journey coin – orchestration. For Gartner, this is a mission-critical approach that ensures marketing teams fully realize the potential of their data. Here, in the depths of technology and data lie insights that can refine the touchpoints and pain points of the customer journey, ensuring that every step along the route is shaped according to customer expectations and feedback.

As a recent piece in B2B International highlights, customers are a critical asset; without them, companies are nothing more than ideas. It is the positive customer experience that drive sales, and it is the orchestration and management of the journey that keeps the customers coming back for more.

There is a difference between the management of a customer journey and the orchestration of the customer journey.

Orchestrating the customer journey is defined as: keeping customers consistently engaged with the brand by creating real-time positive experiences throughout the journey. It’s the connection of touchpoints, data points, data sources, and systems in a methodical way that allows the brand to map out actions and create intelligent customer interactions.

Managing the customer journey is defined as: taking customer information from different parts of the customer journey and mapping out how specific audience segments may behave within certain environments. This approach is more about how customers and audiences react within their groupings and markets and doesn’t usually flow in real-time.

Wrapped around the journey, be it orchestration or management, is the customer journey map. This is a definitive breakdown of how the customer undertakes their journey within the brand and maps out (literally) every touchpoint or route that the customer could potentially take. The customer journey map can be focused on a particular part of the customer experience, or it can be used to target a specific element of the sales funnel or sales cycle. This is an invaluable tool that helps the organization to learn more about the customer.

The Customer Journey Map

Right. You’ve decided that you would like to create this golden highway through your business that captures and holds the attention of your customers. Wonderful. Now you need to pick the customer journey map that best suits your brand and the type of customer experience you want to create.

As this is essentially your customer journey GPS, you need to know what touchpoints it has to, well, touch, along with:

  • A flowchart or a visual representation of your golden pathway, your customer journey
  • Every touchpoint that your customer will potentially interact with that can be used to create stickiness
  • The pain points that could possibly cause friction and inhibit customer engagement

Then, once you’ve invested time into collating this essential data, you need to consider three different types of customer journey map. Their flavors are broken down into:

  • The Typical B2B Customer Journey Map offers you a strategic overview of the steps your customer will take throughout their journey and integrates the touchpoints and pain points you’ve already established.
  • The Tactical B2B Customer Journey Map drills down into specific areas of the business to refine a certain touchpoint or address the issues inherent within a certain pain point. This type of map is essential if you want to smooth out the edges of your customer interactions and highlight specific areas of the customer journey.
  • The Performance and Improvement Customer Journey Map takes the tactical map a step further, pulling the marketing team deeper into the customer’s journey and experiences. This type of map is essential if you want to find the pain points causing the most damage to your customer relationships and if you want to unpack those areas of the business that are having the most significant impact on customer perceptions and engagement.

Make sure your investment in journey orchestration is effective and profitable

Now that you’ve unpacked the data, focused on the journey map, and gained a rich understanding of your customer’s golden pathway, you need to test your approaches to ensure that they resolve problems or enhance experiences. You don’t want to create a map and then orchestrate a complex journey only to discover that it added more issues than it resolved.

Your first step is to test your processes with a smaller customer segment to see how well they work and then slowly expand these as they prove successful. Monitor everything and tweak what works or doesn’t work in a constant process of optimization and transformation. This ensures that you’re using the data you’re collating effectively and that every part of your process is aligned to your map, customer, and strategy.

The value of customer journey mapping

This entire process, from orchestration to management to map development, is focused on creating a customer-centric organization and marketing strategy. This is the inherent value of the process and the work that has to go into every part of this process. Using this process, you can sidestep the silos and the traditional limitations of departments and segmentation to create a holistic view that can transform your customer connections.

However, in the B2B market, it is worth remembering that customer experiences and the routes to purchase can be complex and twisty. There are multiple requirements, touchpoints, compliance expectations, and supplier processes that have to be taken into consideration. These are challenging for marketing teams to map and orchestrate and can result in intensely convoluted maps or maps that are too brief to offer much value. You can refine your mapping processes more effectively if you’re aware of these limitations.

Engaged customers on a golden pathway drive long-term strategic growth

Your customers are your greatest admirers. They are your best salespeople. Their engagement and satisfaction will echo down the line to every new customer and recommendation you get. If you can use these tools to create an engaging customer journey mapped to success across multiple funnels, touchpoints, and objectives, you can drive long-term strategic growth.

Build the perfect golden highway to customer success with GROW

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Corephotonics develops an immersive website experience with GROW

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Challenge

Corephotonics wanted to build a website that would better reflect its portfolio of inventive products and solutions, which was more in line with its recent acquisition by Samsung and its role as an innovation center. The company collaborated with GROW to unpack its website strategy across visual presentation, content, and visibility to better showcase the depth of its technology offering.

In addition to becoming a living portfolio of new and existing technology innovation, the website had to serve as a recruitment platform that would attract the right level of talent to its doors. It needed to have a clear balance between portfolio, technology development, and business and fully capture the depth of the brand.

Solution

The GROW team immersed themselves into the company, its technology, and its service offering to ensure that the final website product was aligned to what Corephotonics needed. By fully realizing the brand’s potential and getting to know its ethos, vision, and market, GROW could work more cohesively with Corephotonics in developing a highly visual and engaging website.

The website had to show the depth of the Corephotonics offering and the brand’s incredible achievements in the field of photography and mobile device capability. To this end, the website was designed to be as visual as possible, using extraordinary images and bright colors to immediately convey what the brand represents.

The content created for the site also had to reflect this crystal-clear focus. It had to be sharp, appealing, and relevant, allowing visitors to intuitively navigate the site without impacting the visual experience. GROW’s copy was sharp and to the point, highlighting relevant information in bite-sized chunks that encouraged further reading and engagement.

Results

Developed on WordPress, laid out in an easy-to-read and navigate format, and designed to be easy to update, the new Corephotonics website delivered precisely what the customer needed. The copy, design, and development process was smooth, and the final product was both relevant and engaging. The company now has a highly visual and appealing website that it can easily update to keep it fresh and vibrant and that captures the full range of the company’s services and solutions.

Testimonial

“We thoroughly enjoyed working with the GROW team in planning, designing and developing our website. They immediately understood what we needed and collaborated with us closely to ensure that we got the content, design, and functionality we wanted for our site going forward.”

Eran Kali, VP Sales and Licensing at Corephotonics.

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Marketing Return on Investment: Part 2, Measurement and Visibility

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Success lies in optimization. Constantly fine-tuning and tweaking performance and investment using clear ROI metrics means that campaigns move from underperformers to winners because they learn and evolve. The following benchmarks are the most common when it comes to ensuring that your marketing ROI is up to scratch:

  1. Cost per lead – divide the total campaign spend by the total leads generated.
  2. Conversion rate – assess these per channel and device.
  3. Cost per acquisition or sale – calculate this by dividing the total campaign cost by the sales generated by the campaign.
  4. Customer lifetime value – calculate this with the formula of: average sale per customer x average times they purchase per year x average retention time for a typical customer.

Each of these metrics will help you to gauge the long- and short-term success of campaigns and marketing endeavors. It’s important not to get hung up on them, however, but to instead use them as tools that help you to create more cohesive and capable campaigns.

The next step is to focus on how you can take these calculations and improve your overall marketing ROI. This can be done in numerous ways, most of them quite obvious to the talented marketing team. The first is to go back to the metrics you’ve been using to assess your campaigns and ask if they are the right ones and if perhaps these need to be adjusted to meet more relevant business expectations. Then, play around with the marketing channels on offer to you to see if you can see gains in areas that perhaps you didn’t expect – this can inform future campaign investment and strategy. Further refine this with A/B testing and clear budget outlines that provide clarity around spend and income.

The value of these approaches and methodical analyses cannot be understated as they allow for marketers not just to assess their approaches and campaign successes but to show the C-suite and decision-makers how every step within a campaign’s trajectory has been used to deliver a particular result.

Now you need to calculate your marketing ROI

It’s time to take your marketing ROI beyond the formulae and into fine-tuned perfection that fits your business. You want to create campaigns that really work. That do what you want them to do. And you want to be able to do this on demand, knowing that your choice of channel, tone, and approach is spot on every time.

Marketing ROI is reliant on the cost of your campaign versus the output, so you can start by assessing the ROI of a given marketing program to determine how this will shape investment moving forward. For example, you can use the formulae above to evaluate a campaign’s spend versus output value and then use this insight to gain additional budget. It’s a reliable way of justifying your spending while equally gaining insight into the total ROI your marketing efforts have generated.

The next step is to establish a baseline. This can be where campaigns start against where they end up, thereby proving the value of a campaign approach or particular omnichannel strategy. Or it can be used as a benchmark of success that every campaign needs to reach. Using metrics like A/B testing and cost per lead/acquisition/sale, you can further refine this baseline to ensure that your campaigns achieve their full potential.

Then, you’re going to need a benchmark of the competition. It’s always worth seeing how competitors are faring in your market and what tactics they’re using to capture its attention. Using this data, you can refine your campaigns to fill gaps or improve your approaches.

In addition to these steps, you can unpack your ROI against various calculations. These include your total campaign revenue, gross profit, and net profit and should be added to all the other cost factors such as agency fees, overheads, internal costs, creative costs, media and channel fees, and other unanticipated expenses. All these can then be combined to gain a clear financial picture of how your marketing efforts are performing against their cost to company.

Finally, ask yourself one very important question – what does all this mean in light of the customer? You must always bring the story back to the customer lifetime value, which includes their story within the brand story over their lifetime with the brand. It’s not an impossible metric to measure, and it is one that has proven invaluable to marketing teams in the past. To assess this, simply subtract your customer revenue from the cost of acquiring them, and you’ve got their lifetime value.

This lifetime value is, well, invaluable. Not only is it more expensive to woo new customers, but loyal customers spend more over their lifetime, which means they deliver constant ROI to the brand.

Marketing cost is any incremental cost that’s incurred during campaign execution

No marketing campaign is free. This is what makes the ROI conversation so important. Without return on this often very expensive investment, companies aren’t going to put more spend in the marketing bucket. Nor should they – the cost is too high to drip funds down a well that’s run dry.

Metaphors aside, several costs are impossible to avoid when it comes to building up a genuinely impactful marketing campaign. These are:

  • Pay-per-click
  • Media spend
  • Content production
  • External marketing fees
  • External agency fees
  • Display ad clicks

These costs are factored into the ratio mentioned earlier, the one where if you get 5:1 ROI, you’re doing a great job and should carry on doing what you’re doing (fine tweaks to optimize campaigns aside).  You can use this ratio to squeeze every last tiny drop of value from your spend and to ensure that your campaigns constantly and consistently maximize their impact.

ROI measurements should account for external factors

Earlier, it was highlighted that external factors are not incorporated into the assessments of marketing ROI as often as they should be and that they are too simplistic and lack visibility into long-term gains.

First, don’t use old and outdated models of attribution to assess your success and ROI. They can no longer provide the level of insight required across the multiple channels used by marketing and the new metrics that define marketing’s success. You also need to consider the customer journey and how the touchpoints they go through before they even consider a purchase have increased exponentially alongside digital and omnichannel. Now, the average customer goes through six to ten touch points before they buy, and so measuring this ROI asks that you assess every one of these – both online and offline.

In conclusion…

All of these factors, from the ratio through to the formulae through to granular analysis of every channel and platform, contribute to your marketing ROI and determine its actual value. Using these steps and approaches, you can streamline your marketing and create more efficient campaigns that deliver measurable results. Now, get out there and measure because there’s no time like the present to transform your marketing strategy and spending.

GROW is a full-service marketing agency passionate about helping B2B companies achieve their goals.

Contact us here to learn how we can help you transform your marketing ROI.

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Marketing Return on Investment with GROW

Posted by & filed under Business.

What is Marketing ROI?

This elusive metric can be complex to capture and measure. According to a recent Hubspot analysis, it is a tool that marketers can use to maximize their investments and connect with customers. According to Meltwater, it’s the profitability of your marketing efforts.

The reality sits between the two. Your marketing ROI is a metric by which you can tangibly measure the financial value of your campaigns against customer engagement, strategic objectives, yield, market growth, and sales.

ROI is important to measure because it provides clarity into your marketing strategy and its effectiveness and allows you to refine individual campaigns to better align with onging strategic objectives. Using ROI, you can unpack how well a campaign performs in which channels and how well customers across multiple touchpoints and channels engage with each campaign and brand. It also allows you to understand the profitability of your campaigns against these channels and to refine resource allocation, strategy, and spend.

How do you measure and improve your marketing ROI?

Calculating your ROI depends on the business, the market, and your expectations, but a solid strategy is to divide net profit or loss by the total marketing spend and then multiply by 100 to get a percentage result.

You can also subtract your sales growth from your marketing costs to assess your marketing ROI or subtract organic sales growth from overall sales growth, as expressed in this well-known formula

(Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = Marketing ROI 

In some cases, sales growth is not directly linked to marketing spending, and the following formula eliminates organic sales growth from the equation. 

(Sales Growth – Organic Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = Marketing ROI

However, a formula is only one part of the ROI equation. You also need to measure your marketing ROI against goals and objectives that reflect how your organization perceives success. One way of doing this is to use the SMART framework that asks you to assess marketing spend and return on that spend against the metrics of: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. These steps cover everything from increasing ROI on social spend, to putting measurable criteria in place, to budget constraints and a clear timeline for achieving your goals.

Then, ensure that all the insights you gain are used to drive future strategies built on the foundations of trusted data and visible metrics.

The challenges of measuring marketing ROI

The problem with most marketing ROI metrics and measurements is that they rarely take in the whole picture and often result in shaky results that don’t reflect the value marketing has gained or the impact it has had. Most marketing metrics are too simple and ignore the multiple external factors that impact a campaign, such as seasons, trends, and events; plus, they often focus on short-term results and don’t fully align success against the entire duration of a campaign.

Another challenge is that the marketing landscape is omnichannel, so customers hurtle through multiple touchpoints before they purchase. This means that often their route to sales is hard to track and difficult to quantify.

What is good marketing ROI?

 If you want an exceptional ROI metric, then you are looking at 10:1, but the average is around 5:1, with anything less than 2:1 falling well below par. This ratio is established using the formula outlined above and assessing the results against overall marketing costs such as overheads, margins, marketing spend, omnichannel investment, brand development, and more.

Why use this ratio? Because it is a very immediate and visible way of assessing marketing activity and using the insights to tweak campaigns and spend appropriately.

Why pay attention to marketing ROI? Because here lies a wealth of information and data that you can use to transform your marketing spend and its success rates. Information can help you optimize your channels and refine your approaches, which can help you constantly tweak and shape your campaigns to achieve sustainable success.

In Part 02 of this series we dig deeper into marketing ROI and the different methodologies, approaches, and strategies you can use to make your marketing spend work for you.

 

GROW is a full-service marketing agency passionate about helping B2B companies achieve their goals.

Contact us here to learn how we can help you transform your marketing ROI.

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GOARC’s marketing & brand presence revitalized with GROW’s B2B content capabilities

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Challenge

GOARC collaborated with GROW to develop a vibrant and cohesive strategy with carefully curated messaging that would allow it to stand out as a trusted service provider and innovator in a very traditional market. GOARC blends the latest technology and tech terminology into solutions that address specific pain points for companies operating in industrial environments. However, the market can perceive this as too complicated or threatening.

The sector that GOARC serves has long relied on manual or time-consuming processes built on legacy technology that’s limited in scope and functionality. However, this reliance makes many companies reluctant to step out of their comfort zone – worker and site safety are absolutely critical, and companies don’t want to introduce unnecessary risk. This concern meant that GOARC and GROW had to find an intelligent way of establishing the brand’s capabilities without triggering these pain points.

  • The two companies decided to frame the technology and the smart solutions created by GOARC in a fresh and transparent way, using clear language that informed and advised but didn’t overwhelm or over-complicate. The brand identity, tone, and messaging were then developed in alignment with this objective and ticked the boxes of: straightforward, relevant, simple, and benefits-driven.

Solution

GOARC created a cohesive marketing and branding strategy that aligned with the market’s unique perceptions and brought them together with the GROW service offering. The result was a comprehensive branding exercise that included:

  • Simple and straightforward language and tone
  • The GOARC value proposition and technology innovation framed within the right language
  • Messaging crafted to suit the industry and the solutions on offer
  • Content marketing strategy that included blogs, whitepapers, and PRs to cement GOARC’s reputation and standing
  • Website marketing strategy to reinforce the messaging and brand identity

Results

The GROW ethos of high availability, service, and professionalism ensured GOARC achieved its communication and market penetration goals. The website is bright and engaging with crisp messaging, and clear sales points and content has been regularly curated to address particular industry pain points and GOARC solutions. In addition, the content and website strategies are aligned to ensure that every GOARC touchpoint is consistent across the digital ecosystem.

Today, GOARC and GROW continue to collaborate on a cohesive marketing strategy that evolves alongside market demands and perceptions.

Testimonial

“GROW has done an excellent job crafting engaging content for all our marketing needs. Their team deeply understands the market, they do their research thoroughly, and the daily communication and collaboration are as smooth as possible. Excellent service, very good content and deadlines are never missed. We have built a strong online presence and engaged with the sector in fresh ways thanks to this relationship and look forward to continuing this partnership well into the future.”

Jude Liemberg, Marketing Director of GOARC

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Is Your Marketing Budget Sufficient to Fuel Your Growth?

Posted by & filed under Technology.

Marketing Future is Bright

According to Gartner’s Annual CMO Spend Survey, The State of Marketing Budget and Strategy 2022, the marketing future is bright. Following record lows in 2021, 2022 marketing budgets as a percentage of company revenue have climbed from 6.4% to 9.5% despite a wide range of negative global factors, such as inflation, COVID, supply chain hiccups, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In fact, most CMOs who participated in Gartner’s survey expect these external factors to positively impact their strategy and investment in the upcoming year. This data is aligned with the August 2021 CMO Survey, which shows marketing spending growth returning to pre-pandemic levels and an optimistic outlook for the next 12 months. The latest IPA Bellwether Report also concurs, reporting that 14.1% of companies increased their marketing budgets in Q1 2022, bringing it to the highest level in eight years.

Marketing Budget: How Much to Allocate?

Marketing budget as a percent of total revenue varies widely by industry. According to the CMO survey, the B2C product sector allocates an average of 13.7% of revenue to marketing budgets; the B2B product sector allocates only 6.7% of revenue to marketing spend.  Gartner indicates that the highest marketing spend increases can be found in the financial services industry (10.4%), the travel and hospitality industry (8.4%), and tech products (10.1%), while consumer goods companies have decreased their budgets from 8.3% in 2021 to 8.0% in 2022.

Where to Focus the Marketing Budget?

If you’ve turned your attention to digital channels, you are in good company. According to Gartner, 56% of marketing spend is allocated to digital channels. Of these digital channels, reports show that 29.5% of marketing budget was dedicated to website, email, and mobile channels. Social media and SEO spend followed.

 

Here’s how Marketing Leaders focused their marketing budgets in 2022:

Marketing Spend on Email Marketing

The reason so many marketing leaders planned to channel their marketing budget toward email marketing platforms, is because the relatively low cost of email marketing traditionally delivers the highest ROI: $36 for every $1 spent. That means companies receive 36 times every dollar they invest. A no brainer for any marketing leader.

In addition, email marketing technologies and automation are helping companies better segment their target audiences and achieve better results. Even simple automations — such as sending an automatic welcome email when someone subscribes to your list, or sending an email reminder to renew their contract  — help you nurture relationships and keep more customers.

Marketing Spend for Events and Sponsorship

Beyond digital channels, additional marketing investment in traditional channels is necessary. As most of the world relaxes its COVID restrictions, investments in offline channels are rebounding. One area of growth in the offline channel is events and sponsorships.

During the pandemic, events and sponsorships disappeared from the marketing mix. With social distancing essentially a thing of the past, in-person events – such as trade shows — are back in full force. According to Gartner, in-person events account for almost 20% of total offline spend, and even slightly more when it comes to B2B companies (21.9%).

In-house or Outsource Marketing Budgets?

  With 58% of CMOs reporting a shortage of talent that hampers their ability to execute their marketing strategy, an increasing number of companies are choosing to outsource their marketing activities. Partnering with an agency gives your business an edge as you will benefit from having an objective perspective and fresh ideas about your product or service. No matter how talented your internal team, their knowledge base is limited to what they know. However, an agency’s years of experience and exposure to industry best practices will help you hone your strategy and find the right selling points to highlight to stakeholders and customers.

In addition, proper creative materials and branding are essential for success when trying to stand apart in a busy marketplace. So is a robust content strategy. An in-house marketing team offers limited capabilities, while a full-service agency can handle digital marketing and SEO, content strategy and creation, social media management, trade show marketing, business plans and proposals, video marketing, and so much more.

Plan for Success with the Right Marketing Budget

The optimistic marketing outlook is good news for businesses that hope to thrive in uncertain economic times. Channeling funds to your marketing budget can ensure that your unique business goals are met through robust marketing campaigns. Enlisting the help of a professional marketing agency can help you get the right message to the right audience through the right (online and offline) channel at the right time.

GROW is a full-service marketing agency passionate about helping B2B companies achieve their goals. Contact us here to learn how we can help you drive qualified leads, increase conversion rates, and nurture sales opportunities.

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Maris launches global presence with GROW’s B2B capabilities

Posted by & filed under Case Studies.

Challenge

MARIS TECH was establishing a name for itself on the defense market and was heading towards the initial public offering (IPO) phase on Nasdaq as well as preparing to launch an exhibit at the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) 2022 Annual Meeting and Exposition – one of the largest military exhibitions in the United States. However, the company had not developed its branding and had no marketing assets or materials to present at the event.

 

The company had to build its brand and to prepare all the materials required for both the IPO and the event in just under five months, and approached Grow Corp (Grow) to provide hands-on branding advisory, support and asset deliverables.

Solution

Grow created a cohesive marketing and branding solution that encompassed all the essential elements and required materials, on time, and within budget. In close collaboration with the client, Grow created a full branding bouquet that included:

  • Logo design and development in close alignment with the brand and its ideals
  • Icons, fonts, image and color development to ensure brand consistency
  • An investor presentation
  • Full website design and development
  • A corporate video
  • A comprehensive content marketing strategy and portfolio inclusive of company profile and product outlines
  • Exhibition design, collateral and material development

Results

The Grow ethos of high availability, service and professionalism ensured that MARIS TECH achieved every one of its marketing and branding objectives in record time. The exceptional standards of the content, video materials, and assets ensured that the company was presented in the most professional and engaging way possible.

The IPO was a success and MARIS TECH is now listed on Nasdaq, and now the company has secured Grow’s services to add on an IR section to the website and to expand its content portfolio.

 

Testimonial
“We were concerned that we would not be able to achieve our content marketing and marketing collateral objectives in time for both the IPO and the exhibition, but Grow Corp proved us wrong. The team is professional and responsive, and ensured that our materials for the tradeshow, the branding and design, and the entire process were as seamless and engaging as possible. .”

Israel Bar, CEO of MARIS TECH.

 

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Comprehensive branding at Startup Speed

Posted by & filed under Case Studies.

Challenge

As a new company, OpenD wanted to build an accessible marketing portfolio that would allow for the all stakeholders to gain instant visibility into its goals, value proposition, business strategy, product offering and more. For OpenD, it was important to create materials that would showcase the company’s fresh and innovative approaches to data and analytics, and that could be used to engage with customers and stakeholders in the future.

 

The challenge was, in just three weeks, to create a vibrant portfolio of marketing and branding materials for an internal company conference that was intended to introduce all stakeholders to OpenD’s strategic and marketing ambitions so it could gain approval and move to the next level of its growth and development.

 

To achieve this seemingly impossible task, OpenD contracted GROW to provide hands-on branding advisory, support and asset deliverables.

Solution

GROW’s multi-disciplinary team collaborated closely with OpenD to create an imaginative, smart and cohesive branding and messaging pack that included:

  • Logo design and development in close alignment with the brand and its ideals
  • Infographics and brand messaging: Icons, fonts, images and colors’ development to ensure brand consistency
  • Full website design and development
  • Content marketing
  • Product marketing slide deck & brochure

Results

The GROW ethos of high availability, service and professionalism ensured that OpenD achieved every one of its marketing and branding objectives in time for its internal stakeholder meeting. The exceptional standards of the content ensured that the company met with the board, achieved its approval, and is now moving to the next phase of its exceptional growth.

Testimonial

“We weren’t sure it would be possible to create such a comprehensive branding and marketing portfolio in only three months, but GROW proved us wrong. Not only did we get everything we needed for our internal conference, but it was delivered to exceptionally high standards.”  Zev Morgenstern, CEO of OpenD.