ADVERTISING PARTNERS
A good marketer will wear many hats but a great marketer will bring many heads together including the Chief Executive Officer, The Chief Marketing and Chief Information Officers as well as the Chief Financial Officer to the round table for strategic and tactical agreements. Perhaps your company is not that large and in fact you are one and the same as far as dealing with the operations , marketing, technology and accounting for your company. If that is the case these next few pages are really important for you.
In fact, large companies utilize not only the human resources capabilities to expand exponentially and act quickly but also technologies like ERP enterprise resource planning software like People Soft or SAP, Lotus Notes, Siebel, Salesforce and many others depending on your industry. These tools have allowed small ideas to blossom quickly through what some have called the data store.
Much like the industrial revolution streamlined physical production of goods by centralizing the tools of production in the factory floor, the digital revolution and the web have aggregated their intellectual service tools on the cloud and now most companies are protected from expensive internal solutions that require challenging API integrations. These are now simply provided with turnkey solutions that increase productivity and decrease your operational costs by scaling at will.
Now, traditional marketing programs can be handled in house either by one marketer or a small department but depending on the number of projects, the frequency and the complexity you may decide to invest in your own marketing department or outsource to one of the 13,000 advertising / marketing agencies available. Consider that the cost of a seasoned national marketer can run in the median range of $80,000 dollars a year or roughly $40 and hour so it may be prudent to test your metal by outsourcing to an agency of record and opting to pay the retainer fees and advertising costs instead of a full salary to employees.
With the explosion of marketing software and the internet you may be able to sample some freelance work or perhaps contract help on a flat per project fee basis. Further more there are many marketing consultants that prefer a flat fee plus a percentage of growth or business generated through the campaign especially if your project is digital in nature. Remember that local and regional projects will always be a good place to start before you expand into more advanced national and international markets.
With the explosion of marketing software and the internet you may be able to sample some freelance work or perhaps contract help on a flat per project fee basis. Further more there are many marketing consultants that prefer a flat fee plus a percentage of growth or business generated through the campaign especially if your project is digital in nature. Remember that local and regional projects will always be a good place to start before you expand into more advanced national and international markets.
Last but not least, consider the co-op, referral or affiliate advertising and marketing models where you reach out to complementary companies and work together to recruit your best customers as champions of your product with loyalty rewards. This was known as revenue sharing in the old days and today it is more commonly known as affiliate programs.
Should you decide to outsource this aspect of your business please consider that the marketer will want your business development staff to have a product catalog that is priced competitively and ready for consumption with a pricing model of Cost+ IMU Markup, Premium Pricing, Bulk Discount, Wholesale tiers or One Off / Lost leaders. This will accelerate your time to market.
