Overview of Marketing as a Service (MaaS)
The traditional operating model of marketing is broken. Every day, marketing leaders grapple with competing objectives: drive more revenue, but cut marketing spend. Do more with less— or be the first on the chopping block when companies facing financial challenges inevitably cut costs across the board.
But to drive sales, the marketing engine needs to run continuously, putting this goal squarely at odds with reducing expenses. Marketing produces demand and brings in leads, and these leads feed into the sales pipeline and eventually turn into revenue. Without marketing, sales has a much smaller base to start with, translating into lower sales volume at higher acquisition costs. If marketing spending drops, so does the impact it creates.
At a time when the business needs marketing more than ever, a combination of short-sighted vision and a scramble to show “results” means marketing could become an easy target to scrap when times are tough. A big part of this is marketing’s failure, rightly or wrongly attributed, to demonstrate measurable value to the organization.
As a result, marketing leaders face ticking time bombs: tighter budgets, fewer resources, more accountability for how marketing dollars spent perform, and more pressure to produce revenue impacting results.
Advances in marketing technology have made it easier to measure and predict marketing results vs expenses, taking the guesswork out of programmatic budgets. There is no more wondering which channels are converting, at what rate, and at what cost. Marketing leaders know that putting X dollars into Y programs produces Z results, and until recently, most have focused their cost optimization efforts on the program half of the budget—the portion associated with technology, agencies, event, and advertising spend. But a growing number of CMOs have turned their focus on a new concept that innovates on the other half of the equation: labor.
Labor and headcount account for up to 50% of marketing budgets in the U.S., where the average fully-burdened cost of a marketer is between $100,000 and $150,000 a year. But what’s the result of that labor investment? Like program budgets, can these costs be allocated into Y programs to produce Z results?
The short answer: yes, but that analysis will show that labor is not often allocated efficiently. Most marketing leaders know that their expensive internal staff are working on basic non-core competency execution and operational tasks—in some cases for a significant part of their day. But those tasks need to get done, so they let it happen.
That’s where marketing as a service (MaaS) comes in.
MaaS brings the concept of Managed Services—which has been used by a host of functions including IT, HR, Finance and Accounting for years— to marketing, where execution and operational tasks are outsourced offshore to extend the capacity of your workforce, while internal staff focus on more strategic and high-value work. Offshore outsourcing is one of the biggest cost-saving measures a business can take, and when done well, has no adverse impact on efficiency and quality of service. In fact, it often improves service quality by bringing in best practices and standardized process execution.
MaaS, What is it?
Marketing as a service (MaaS) is a transformational marketing operating model designed to drive greater impact at lower cost
How does it work?
Organizations outsource marketing execution functions to a dedicated and specialized offshore team, freeing up internal resources to take on higher value, strategic work. By keeping strategic functions in-house, organizations retain control over marketing strategy and can ensure brand consistency across different products, verticals and campaigns.
Why is it important?
At 30-50% lower costs than internal US-based headcount, and almost 70% lower costs than onshore agencies, the MaaS model enables a reimagined operating model that allows you to scale your marketing in a cost-effective way— either by reallocating budgets to turn on more programs and campaigns or by creating greater impact within programs that are already running. MaaS resources work as an extension of your own team, which means you reap the benefits of cost savings, dedicated expertise and best practices— without the additional need to train and onboard every new resource
Who is it for?
From mid-sized organizations to multinational enterprises, MaaS enables you to ramp up your marketing function no matter where you are in your organization’s marketing maturity. With a key focus on data-driven decision making, MaaS enables you to achieve the highest level of marketing sophistication: where marketing is a scalable, sustainable engine that drives growth effectively and efficiently.
“Marketing leaders recognize the need to grow, get organized and run their marketing teams like a business. Gone are the days when marketing operations was focused solely on the ‘run’ aspects of
the marketing business.”
Key features of MaaS
Central to the MaaS operating model is reimagining the marketing organization and splitting the work along strategic and execution functions. For most businesses, marketing execution isn’t a core competency and that’s okay!
To use a simple analogy, if a pipe bursts and the basement starts flooding, we wouldn’t try to fix it ourselves. Instead, we turn the water off and pay a plumber who has the tools to fix it and has spent a decade fixing exactly these kinds of problems. We rely on experience and institutional knowledge to get the job done fast and well, while we focus on more important things that only we can do.
Similarly, by decentralizing marketing execution, your organization benefits from the depth and breadth of operational and executional experience garnered over many years across different clients with problems exactly like yours—things like leveraging new marketing technology, managing the day-to-day of digital advertising and email campaigns, running demand generation and outreach efforts, performing campaign optimization and lead routing. These are necessary components for a well-run marketing engine, but they are not core competencies for most businesses.
But some parts of marketing should be kept within the organization— in fact, there’s great value in keeping the strategic functions in-house. Your unique value proposition, the elements of your brand and voice, your competitive differentiation story only you can establish and govern these, and you should. Retaining strategic roles in-house also ensures you maintain control over the bigger picture of your marketing strategy and how that ties into driving organizational growth.
