Thought leadership marketing

I presented on this topic at the Nasscom Emerging Companies Forum on Friday morning and I have also placed the slides here. Email me at vinod.harith@cmoaxis.com if you would like the PDF version. It was a great session with a very interactive audience. A friend from a leading IT company brought up this point of view - he says thought leadership is not a tool intended for lead generation or growing revenues but should be used as a strategic program to shape and manage your company's brand and perception among your target group. I have a slightly different point of view on this. Sure - thought leadership should improve your brand and perception, but if it eventually does not get you a seat at the table for a deal or open business conversations or bring in leads, why bother? I would love to hear your views on this - do post or email me!

SMBs and the three l'll marketing myths

With the growing sophistication of web marketing, email marketing and social/ business networking channels, small and medium businesses (SMBs) are no longer a disadvantaged lot when it comes to marketing themselves right. At CMO Axis we have been speaking to several SMB CEOs and I believe what perhaps stops of these companies from achieving marketing epiphany is their leaning towards some popular myths. I have tried to address some of them for the benefit of my readers and our customers and I would love to hear from you if you have any thoughts contrary or collaborative to what I have outlined here.

Myth #1: Marketing is for large businesses, for us - sales is king.

It is appalling to see how many CEOs put their sales teams through the grind mill to achieve results that could perhaps be achieved in half the time with the right marketing plan resulting in better revenues and productivity. Effective marketing is no longer about spending $$$, but in sharpening your focus to optimally leverage your 'business ecosystem', accurately reach your target segment and generate qualified leads, often at very little or NO cost. It is the perfect compliment to your sales strategy.

Myth #2: Our marketing is outsourced - we have a design agency and a PR agency.

Many SMBs truly believe that if they have a PR agency and a design or ad agency, they have covered their marketing requirements well. Unfortunately, marketing is not how well you have designed your website, but how effectively you have tailored your messaging and communication to your target buyers. It is good PR, but often not limited to that. It is about right targeting and positioning and building insightful and strategic marketing programs that increase your share of mind with your prospects, improve your odds of winning in a competitive bid and reduce your sales costs and cycle time.

Myth #3: We cannot afford fancy marketing consultants

Marketing outsourcing is often confused with brand consulting or similar high-end marketing strategy work. While marketing outsourcing involves its share of advisory, it is in reality a very practical and inexpensive approach to delivering measurable business value. It gives you access to best-in-class marketing processes and industry best practices by leveraging marketing professionals and more importantly, practitioners with significant functional experience. It also helps you cut your time to market and improve spend efficiencies by not having to reinventing the wheel when it comes to designing and running your strategic marketing programs.

Finally, marketing outsourcing keeps your costs variable and flexible, adding greater predictability to your spends and lowering your overall risk and exposure if you are not sure if you want to hire yourself that ace marketing team yet.

Marketing Outsourcing - The cost vs. capability interplay

I have run marketing and communications departments for small and large organizations for over 15 years now and I cannot but agree with Professor Gail McGovern of the Harvard Business School when she says that 'few companies own all the marketing expertise they need'.

It is very easy to find low level tactical resources for your team - to run your trade shows, clean your databases, design your collateral or websites and track your marketing campaigns but as you go up the value chain to programs like thought leadership, new media strategies and CRM, the quality and availability of resources just dries up. So the perennial question that CMO organizations are faced with is 'what do we outsource?' and more importantly, 'why do we outsource?'. The answer more often than not lies in the interplay between cost and capability.

Organizations either outsource for reasons of cost - because outsourcing makes better fiscal sense, gives them shared access to best practices and allows for better utlization and deployment of existing resources. The key interplay here being investing in organic capability building vs. outsourcing and hiring plans always seem to trail business growth. The other reason that drives outsourcing is capability (or lack of it) - quite often the right resources are hard to come by and we are saddled with well meaning, talented marketing managers who are lower down the learning curve, while business imperatives require our people to hit the ground running.

While marketing organizations have been pioneers in the space of outsourcing - and we have been doing this long before the days of IT or call center outsourcing, the maturity of outsourcing has been pretty low with a high reliance on traditional advertising or design firms who have clearly not been able to change with the times. The result - several CMO organizations continue to be under-leveraged and operate at sub-optimal efficiencies.

Clearly, the answer is in looking at your marketing department as any other business function and splice it into a group of well defined processes that lead to measurable outcomes. Once that is done, the rest is easy - each process can now be evaluated on the basis of cost and resource intensity and strategic relevance and a few processes that are core to the business should be retained in-house and the rest outsourced to a vendor or a location where it can be best done.

So how does the CMO organization decide what they should in-source and what they should outsource and where? I have a 'marketing investment matrix' that I have developed that could serve as a useful little tool for this - more about that later!