Which marketing campaigns should you outsource?

Which marketing campaigns should you outsource? The types of marketing automation campaigns you might consider outsourcing fit broadly into five top level categories. While not an exhaustive list, these are the most common categories, focussed on those that would bring you the highest value if outsourced.

Kinds of campaigns to outsource

1. Outsource the most advanced campaigns

In this category are the most sophisticated campaigns, the ones that require advanced skills you don’t have in-house. Or when you do have those skills in-house, prioritising these kinds of campaigns can tie up resources you could better deploy elsewhere, on other important activities.

This could include the campaigns built long ago that you no longer understand. Don’t worry, we know your pain! In any mature Marketing Automation team there are sophisticated campaigns that were originally developed by people who have long since left the business. While templated, reusable logic and content really is the only way forward, without a safe pair of hands and constant attention, using the pre-existing complex logic can become risky and prone to costly errors.

2. The most manual campaigns

This category of campaigns is usually at the top of the list for outsourcing. In most fast paced Marketing Automation environments, there exists backbone campaigns that require running on a regular basis, albeit with variations each time.

Some of these are impossible to automate, often for reasons of variable data availability, or it could simply be that time has not been found to dedicate to the automation setup. Whatever the case, handing these campaigns off to a trusted party frees up your time to focus on more strategic goals and post campaign analytics, while leaving the campaigns in a safe pair of hands.

3. The most time consuming campaigns

Which campaigns are consuming the most time from your team? Developing campaigns that are accurate, to specification, generate ROI and are most of all qualitatively correct is a time intensive endeavour. This is time that your team are not spending on areas of operation that you may well consider more important, but less urgent.

By outsourcing time consuming campaigns, you can increase your overall throughput of more advanced activity without compromising on quality or a reduction in production.

4. The most out of date campaigns

In this category are the campaigns that have been around for a long time, perhaps the people who built them are still with you, perhaps they are not. In any case, these campaigns may be providing some very important functions for your business, driving customers to purchase, or maintaining service levels in some way.

Often we find that campaigns in this category have not been looked at for a long time, perhaps years, simply because they have never been the priority. Outsourcing in this category allows for a fresh pair of eyes to design a ground-up rebuild that meets the modern needs of your business with greater precision and understanding than your developers had at the time of the original build.

5. The slowest campaigns

In this category are the campaigns in your workspace that are in most dire need of optimisation. We find that with the maturity of modern Marketing Automation technologies, there are often many different ways to achieve the overall marketing requirement, and some of those ways are definitely more right than others. Your business and its data is constantly changing and the solution that may have been perfectly acceptable two years ago may not stand up to modern needs; especially with the explosive proliferation of data available to modern marketing systems.

Campaigns within this category may still run to a successful conclusion, but keep in mind they are consuming critical resources while they run, even on a SaaS system, operational bandwidth is still an important consideration.

A best practice approach to campaigns like this transitions the sub-optimal back to the optimal, freeing up system resource, shortening digital comms sending windows and improving your marketing stacks overall performance. If a campaign can be re-engineered to run in 30 minutes as opposed to six hours, can you afford not to outsource it for rebuild?

Purple Square’s managed services include Campaign Delivery which frees our clients to focus on strategy, knowing their campaigns are being expertly managed. Backed up with over 250 years of collective Marketing Automation experience, our team becomes an extension of yours. Ready to outsource some of your marketing campaigns?