Marketing is the responsibility of everybody, according to Evert Gummesson, Professor of Service Management & Marketing at Stockholm University.
His words are never truer than when applied to small and medium businesses, where the absence of a dedicated marketing department and the constraints of a tight budget dictate that crucial marketing functions are often delegated to staff who are short of both the time and expertise to co-ordinate an effective campaign.
Yet the constant need to retain existing customers while developing new business demands that marketing be an ongoing activity, and SMEs must find innovative and cost-effective ways of making the most of limited resources.
One prevailing view among marketing consultants asked for their advice on how to delegate marketing responsibilities throughout a company is : don’t. Instead, they say, bring in an outside expert.
Richard Bush, managing director of Base One, comments, The idea of delegating marketing is worrying in itself. If you can’t justify employing a qualified marketing person, if at all possible, bring in an external supplier to implement, manage and crucially analyse the marketing activity.
It’s better to pay a specialist as and when required than to give it to someone who doesn’t have the knowledge or, quite frankly, the interest.
Bush continues, We find this works particularly well for growing and developing companies, where we play the role of a ‘virtual’ marketing department.
Bush adds that, to be effective, a marketing strategy should be developed by or with the person running the company or at the very least with the director responsible for sales or business development. Once the strategy is in place, responsibility for implementing it can be delegated, as long as it is actively managed and monitored.
Bob Dearsley is chairman of the IT Marketing Group (ITMG), a pan-European business-to-business technology PR and marketing agency, with several clients too small to have a full-time marketing director. He also recommends that SMEs buy in marketing expertise.
For any SME worried about costs, having a safe pair of hands to pull the strings makes a huge difference, comments Dearsley. From a marketing perspective, we would recommend employing smaller organisations to work alongside you to extend the marketing resources available to a company.
Dearsley advises that the head of the business sets out a target schedule of activity and then acts as an approval point as the programme progresses. He suggests that this is also an efficient way for a company to keep its head-count low.
He continues: We are invariably extolling the outsource approach for a small organisation, which is the nature of a virtual business with a small number of people at the centre plus people brought in to undertake jobs as they are required.
New2marketing is a specialist SME marketing consultancy which offers a full range of marketing services to help small and growing businesses to become ‘e-enabled’. Managing director Ben Harris says this is an area where outside support is particularly crucial.
From our experience of working with SMEs, they don’t have the experience in-house. They need to find an agency to do it. Okay, they may have a small budget, and that makes it harder. But it’s better to do a few things well
According to the National Business 2 Business Centre (NB2BC), emarketing is an activity which lends itself particularly well to in-house delegation. Says the NB2BC’s marketing team leader, Heidi Stewart: Take web sites, for example, which many SMEs have totally managed outside the company.
The trouble with that is that, when you want to make a change, you’ve got to go back to your web developer. Whereas if you have a content management system in-house, anyone within the organisation can use it. Stewart explains that a simple system works like a word document. The MD can write the content, and a general admin person can input it and send it live.
She adds: You can retain control. You don’t need a webmaster. Sometimes people overlook the resources they’ve got. An ‘e-shot’ can also be delegated by building a contact list in Outlook Express. No knowledge of HTML is required. Similarly, there are many off-the-shelf software products available to design a newsletter template.
Stewart draws the line at online search marketing, where anti-spamming laws can easily be broken by ‘cold emailing’ prospects generated online. Instead, she advises guiding subscribers to your newsletter or to buying an ‘opt-in’ list of email addresses available from a variety of sources, such as marketingfile.com.
