In a relatively small period of time – we’re talking under 10 years – the Internet has been transformed from a fledgling medium where a B2B business presence generally meant a shoddily put together brochure site (that either cost you a fortune, or was done by someone’s brother/mate down the pub – delete as appropriate), to a place where you can find all the tools and applications you need to enable your marketing and your business to flourish.
It’s like the automotive industry going from the Model T to the Audi TT in the same amount of time. The pace of change is quite incredible and seems to be getting faster, at least now that uptake of online applications is moving from the early- adopter phase into the majority.
Now, on the cusp of the second decade of the 21st century, there’s a wide range of incredible web-based applications that provide the perfect toolkit for B2B marketers to take their businesses forward in the digital age. Web 2.0 has created a raft of really innovative companies and products who specialise in doing specific things very well. From online CRM, CMS, collaboration tools, web conferencing, webcasting, marketing automation and reputation monitoring – you name it, there’s an innovative and entrepreneurial business which has developed a specialist capability, used by a growing number of clients. All of these tools are focused on doing a particular task well and are easy to integrate into your business. In fact, their whole success depends on their ability to integrate to fit your needs.
So what’s new? Most of you know this and I’m sure are taking full advantage of this brave and exciting new world. Yet, depressingly, I keep hearing businesses wanting to re-invent the wheel, rather than utilise these proven, effective tools, a state of affairs normally heralded by the dispiriting phrase, ‘well we could do it ourselves in-house’.
I believe this thinking and approach belongs in the last century rather than now, and I think marketers are really suffering because of this.
Why inhouse fails
In-house is fine when you have a breadth and depth of specialist resources ideally suited to your project, but often I hear the dreaded phrase when in-house resources are limited – or their reason for existing is to maintain and develop another core part of the business.
Your project then becomes a side-project that no one really has time or motivation to do well. This means your project won’t be specked correctly, it won’t be on time, it won’t work as you want it to, it won’t be maintained as you need it to be, it won’t be effective. You’ll probably eventually need to spend the money again, if not more, doing it right.
In-house is also often thought of as being cheaper, but I don’t believe this when you look at the real cost, including the time it takes you to launch – when competitive advantage may well be lost. Better value can be found utilising something that already exists. Right now, with the recession, businesses need budgets to go further; if ever there was a time to take advantage of web applications it is now.
Maybe sometimes there are constrictions from IT, or compliance, but I’d suggest these restrictions are more based upon a viewpoint rooted in an old way of business, not the reality of business in the coming decade. Adapting to the cloud (internet) means resetting a lot of ‘policy’.
This problem is by no means confined to larger, more inflexible corporates, it happens at small SMEs who often only have one or two experts – they are particularly at risk then when someone leaves, or goes on holiday, or just if something happens at the weekend when no one is around.
Using the right tools for the right tasks
So what’s the role of a digital agency in all of this? To help clients use these tools to their greatest effect, both creatively and operationally. Ten years ago they used to build the platforms, or would work with systems integrators to do this. It cost a lot and they tied in businesses for a long time. There is no need now; instead, your agency should help you pick the best that’s out there and then provide value on its implementation and use.
If you need to develop your digital presence, look externally, not internally. If IT gives resistance, buy them a copy of The Big Switch by Nicolas Carr and ask them to reconsider.
By the way, this isn’t just a big-up for agencies, one of which pays my salary, but a belief born from experience. I am sure that at the end of the coming decade the whole business infrastructure will be run from the cloud via the browser (Google’s newly announced Chrome OS is based on this vision). And we’ve done the same, we only do the things in-house which we are good at, we partner with others for everything else. So please, never again, ‘well we could do it ourselves inhouse?’
