Imagine, you are standing at the entrance of what appears to be an endless corn maze. You’ve entered a competition where a large cash reward goes to the individual who can successfully navigate the maze in the shortest amount of time.
You look around to evaluate your competition only to realize that it’s just you and one other person. You think to yourself, “I have a 50% chance of winning this pot of cash”… the clock begins. You enter the maze. You feel like you’re taking the proper turns; sometimes you are unsure, and it takes a while, but you eventually complete the maze. As you are walking out, you look up to see your competitor is already showcasing the prize. You ask, “How did they make it through the maze so fast?” The response: “The winner purchased a sheet of helpful clues for navigating the maze. You didn’t?”
Wouldn’t it be incredibly beneficial to be given clues as to what one’s target consumer is looking for? It would save valuable time and money. Time that could be spent on using the clues to better navigate the consumer’s interests while preserving company resources.
John Wanamaker, a pioneer in marketing once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” This feeling is all too common among those who market a business or service. Luckily, in our ever-changing world, technology continues to grow and evolve, providing new strategies to make our lives easier. One of those new strategies is called Marketing-as-a-Service (MaaS). MaaS is a service model wherein a client hires a marketing consulting firm to manage their marketing campaign and to help them navigate their way through the “corn maze” of marketing a new business or service. The consulting firm understands marketing in a way that will maximize profitability and save time for their client. This cutting-edge service tracks the effectiveness of several elements within your marketing strategy.
Because consulting firms are experts, they can provide Marketing Automation tools to their client, launch campaigns, measure their success, and review their metrics, along with the many other benefits that the technology enables. Essentially, MaaS provides the client with the information necessary to identify strong and weak points in their campaign, so the proper changes can be made to drive success.
Driving success in marketing is both an art and a science. The human dynamic is complex. Every person has a story. Every story is different. What drives us as consumers to make certain decisions is based on a variety of factors. Tracking all this information is complex, time consuming, and costly to the average business.
One advertisement is all it may take to snag one consumer while another consumer requires several different approaches. MaaS supports clients in a way that allows them to understand their consumers, so they can continually tweak their campaign and turn leads into sales and those sales into customers.
The right marketing automation tools track inbound marketing techniques. In short, outbound marketing is traditional advertising that “pushes” advertisements by sending them to your home or business. The outbound piece has a rather narrow focus. It simply states why the consumer should buy the product or service, whereas inbound marketing reverses that dynamic. During a web search, a consumer is met with content that instantly leads to even more content in a multitude of formats: product sites, reviews, and blogs, and then more links and more clicks and more content. A plethora of information generated from one simple search.
The combination of marketing consulting and automation tools result in the ideal MaaS offering for businesses that need to maximize the effectiveness of their inbound marketing campaign, as it tracks consumers’ moves on a continuous basis. Consulting firms can recommend the right tools, software, and metrics at the right time based on the client’s needs—that’s the “cheat sheet” for the maze. Because there are a ton of software solutions, business intelligence dashboards, CRM systems, and tools out there, the client doesn’t have to try to navigate it on their own and take the wrong turns. Clients using MaaS can identify what types of media their consumer is interested in reading and what material will most likely be followed by a sale. Furthermore, the client receives information as to what channels those consumers are using.
MaaS offerings can be customized for any business that wants to improve its marketing campaign. A consultant is much more equipped and efficient and hence able to help a client maximize the effectiveness of their campaign. They flawlessly track and gather information based on consumer actions. They know exactly how to interpret information and how to maximize it—once it is collected. It is crucial to understand “why” something did not work in order to improve a campaign. For these reasons, many businesses choose to hire an outside consultant to run their marketing campaign. In most cases, the fee of hiring an outside consultant outweighs the expense of training an individual from within. Plus, a consultant will know the industry inside out and have the expertise you need immediately.
Now … imagine you are standing at the edge of another maze. But this one is virtual and this time you are prepared—you have the clues and insight to make smarter decisions. And this time, you win.
If you would like to explore Marketing-as-a-Service, check out our page Go-to-Market Consulting on the Odigo website.