Marketing as a service lets you tap into valuable skills and experience
Over the weekend, I did some thinking into how tech companies—and tech scale-ups, in particular—benefit by using a marketing as a service company like Cromulent.
I thought of a bunch of reasons, but the most common is probably that working with us (or any other decent agency or consultant, for that matter) lets organizations tap into valuable—and in some cases rare—skills and experience.
This approach provides all sorts of advantages. For instance, it provides short-term agility, letting your organization pursue a new opportunity when everyone’s already busy. It lets you cover gaps while your team grows. It also provides longer-term cost control, because your company can turn to outsourced skill until a full-time hire is justified.
This approach provides short-term agility, lets you cover gaps while your team grows, and provides longer-term cost control.
Wait, Marketing as a Service?
Yes!
Marketing as a service (MaaS) recognizes that effective marketing requires a collection of skills and experience, and that organizations are best-served by ensuring the most capable person handles each task.
In Is marketing-as-a-service the future of marketing?, VentureBeat argues that startups and scale-ups should “keep Marketing as lean and nimble as possible, establishing and staffing for that which is ‘core’ (essential) to your operation and outsourcing the rest.”
This model exists in all sorts of industries. For instance, security as a service is huge right now. Why? Because organizations find themselves under attack, and they don’t have the resources or expertise to hire security specialists. It’s more effective and cheaper to use a service.
Likewise with PR, or accounting, or legal counsel, or plumbing, and so on.
Valuable Attributes
In the Cromulent case, we’ve got a few things in particular which are valuable and rare:
- We’re B2B marketers: from experience, we know that succeeding in B2B takes a conscious strategy, clear positioning, effective messaging, and compelling content
- We understand your technology: we’re not your normal marketers—our technical background lets us learn how your stuff works and what makes it different, so we can help prospects see the value
- We can write: whitepapers, tech showcases, brochures, infosheets, articles, blogs, press releases, statistical studies—our writing capabilities are diverse and rare
- We ‘get’ going global: our team has grown business in markets around the world and created content for global and regional audiences
- We know thought leadership: we’ve (quite literally) had our content featured on the front page of mainstream media (including BBC, CNN, CBC), tech sites (including Ars Technica and Slashdot), business publications (including Forbes and The Wall Street Journal), and countless industry-specific outlets
It’s actually quite difficult to find candidates with one or two of those qualifications, let alone all of them together.
Plus, we tend to work really fast. We work on a project-by-project basis, so there’s no incentive for us to move slowly—more often than not, we produce output faster than our clients can review it.
Domain Experience
Oh, and then there’s industry-specific knowledge. While we’ve done work in a wide range of fields, we have particularly deep experience in:
- Telecommunications and networking
- Cybersecurity
- Artificial intelligence
- Cloud computing
Summing Up: (Cromulent) Marketing as a Service
Working with Cromulent means tapping into valuable skills and domain experience which otherwise are very hard to come by.
Is it the right approach for every organization? Of course not.
But maybe you’ve got a project which needs something special. And if so, we’d be happy to learn more!