Developing an Online Marketing Strategy: What Are My Options?

First came email, then the website.  Not a problem.  Next search and affiliate marketing.  Okay.  Now, local marketing, social and mobile.  Getting tough.  In the online landscape, new channels, new tools and new strategies seem to surface every day.  If you’re overwhelmed, you’re not the only one.  As part of their C-Suite Studies, IBM surveyed over 1,700 Chief Marketing Officers (CMO’s) across the globe.  Their findings?  Most companies feel unprepared by the complexity of it all – social media, new channels and devices, the data explosion.

But complex or not, companies today can’t afford to ignore the value of online marketing.  Your customers are there, your competitors are there, and online is increasingly becoming the most affordable way to acquire a customer.  Ultimately, if you want to get serious about establishing a presence online, you’ve got three main choices: (1) build up an online marketing team in-house; (2) use several different outside vendors; or (3) use one vendor that can manage the whole thing.

Build It Yourself

Building an in-house online marketing team can be attractive.  You get full control over the day-to-day activities, and you create a real asset for the company by sourcing quality talent and building expertise.  But it can get expensive and takes time, valuable time you might not want to waste.  And you’ll always be concerned about the level of expertise of your team, and wondering if you’re doing all you can to help them keep peace with the changing landscape.  This option could be ideal for larger companies with real capital to invest.

Use Multiple Vendors

This is a pretty common route now-a-days.  By using multiple vendors, you can hand pick the strategies or channels you want to pursue, and you’ll be hiring specialists, usually with deep experience in that discipline.  But there are a lot of pitfalls here that companies discover too late.  Individual solution providers often lack business perspective.  They become more focused on the technical execution than bringing you a return.  With “experts,” too, you’ll be paying a premium.  And as you add on more vendors, it can all lead to a coordination nightmare when you’re trying to campaign across multiple channels.  Ultimately, this approach may just be ideal for small businesses that can’t afford to spend in multiple online channels and are rolling the dice on a channel they think will bring the best result in their market.

Find a Managed Service

The last option is a cross between the two above, with some drawbacks but a lot of pluses.  You can find one vendor, one service to manage it all.  (No secret which camp White Label Marketing falls into.)  A single vendor or single “throat to choke” will be more focused on bringing you a return because there is more on the line.  That vendor will also have more flexibility and be better equipped to make it all work together for more sales, more leads, better branding.  And, if you choose right service provider (hint, hint), you’ll find a team with deep expertise across all those channels, at a fraction of the cost.  The downside?  You do give up a level of control, and can depend heavily on a single provider.  A pretty good tradeoff for growing companies, companies new or slow to online marketing, or others who want to invest but need to do it strategically and affordably.