I’ve been watching, with fascination, a marketing campaign unfold at work.
I work for a large corporate, with a many marketing departments all concerned with different areas of business, and it is amazing how busy everybody is to get a marketing campaign ready and rolling.
Of course, the bigger the organisation, the more complex the system becomes. The scale is much bigger than I have encountered before, so therefore the methods need to match the expectations. Of course it’s all very well creating the exercise, but there are many facets involved that aren’t available to an small business.
There’s a process the needs to be followed, from concept to completion, that arrives at a profitable conclusion, or the project would never get off the ground. The main objective is to raise enough awareness so that participants take advantage of a competition, respond to an affiliate and email marketing campaign, download a money-off voucher, cash it in at a specific participating retailer, continue with the product over several years, and spread the word amongst their friends and associates.
By performing within this venture, our participants are providing us with their contact details, statistics about the product and who use it, which retailers also participate, demographics and other popular statistics, and assisting with viral sharing of the company and its product.
But the main crux of this post is that much of the marketing activity is accomplished out of house. Agencies are employed almost at every point in the proceedings, with the corporate merely coordinating and channeling the strategic outcome. They use the expertise of other businesses to fulfill the specialised work, thus maintaining the high value and quality of the campaign. It isn’t worth their while to hire personnel for specific jobs that aren’t needed all the time, when outsourcing certain projects is far more profitable.
This is a far cry from my little business. I did absolutely everything, because I felt I had to. Not only could I bear the thought of outsourcing, I also felt I could do it better myself. Perhaps in a way I could, but it didn’t do me any good. Thoroughly burnt out, my collapse resulted in confusion, disconnection and ultimately failure. If I had had the forethought to use external expertise and outside help, I might still be practicing – but there again, I wouldn’t have learned all my skills that got me my present job in the first place…
