Digital marketing assets: In-house or outsource?

At DeLaune, we specialize in creating benefit-driven digital marketing assets, and we pride ourselves on it. We’d be happy to help you craft a new infographic, a buyer’s guide, or a series of in-depth white papers.

But every organization has a different set of needs. So it makes sense to ask: Are you keeping the right parts of your message creation in-house? Are you taking advantage of outside teams when it makes the most sense?

Outsourcing some or a lot of your marketing frees up your experts to spend more of their time at their core task—developing and improving the product itself.

Are you herding cats?

 

Steering products to release, and then stewarding them in the marketplace, is a multi-level job. Your prospects may only see the final version, but you know that your offerings—whether they’re hardware, software, or complex services—require constant work behind the scenes, from creation to long-term support.

If a product is simple in concept and competes squarely with similarly-featured competition, you may not need much help in actually coming up with the basic information you need to convey. But do you have the bandwidth to create the actual content of every piece of collateral? Are you confident of coming up with the right differentiators? If not, you should consider engaging an experienced team who can.

Do you wash your own windows?

The same goes for in-house expertise that goes into technology marketing generally, especially for products in the B2B space. Your team has the most direct knowledge of your own products and capabilities. But if you can effectively communicate the core of your knowledge to an outside agency (think of it as a brain dump crossed with a sales pitch) that agency can come up with polished marketing assets. That frees your experts to spend more of their time at their core tasks.

Our decades of experience show that there’s no single right answer to the question of which marketing and messaging tasks a firm should look for help with. The only real wrong answer, though, is that you’re not regularly thinking through the pros and cons of extending your own bandwidth in the way that suits your organization.

A sympathetic viewpoint

It’s easy to believe that your audience will see your messaging the same way you do. After all, for all but the newest of startups, many of your prospects are already customers. But that doesn’t mean your marketing will resonate.

An outside marketing partner comes with a built-in reality check: If the team you’re working with can quickly grasp your offering’s advantages and use cases, it means you’re on the right track. If they can’t, (no matter how good you think the message is), it might take a re-think.

Time: They’re not making any more of it

No matter how much you can do in-house, there’s an advantage to keeping some marketing partners in the loop, with enough knowledge that when you’re swamped, they can quickly step in to help.

Why? Because technology marketing can never quite be “set and forget”: Features are added to a flagship product; release dates may slip or (if all goes well) move up; and a new company direction may send ripples through any particular project.

Bringing a marketing vendor up to speed shouldn’t cost you too much in time or money. Going it alone, though, may cost you a lot in the long run.

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DeLaune & Associates can help you develop benefits-driven marketing assets, whether you need help from the ground up or polishing assets that your experts have already prepared. We know enterprise-scale technology marketing and are ready to work together. Let’s get started!