Marketing-as-a-Service (MaaS): What is it and Why do SMBs need it?

In the face of rapidly changing market needs and evolving customer demands, marketing teams must embrace a lean, agile and flexible model for executing marketing ops. Is Marketing-as-a-Service (MaaS) the answer?

At a time when businesses are looking to streamline operations and reduce overheads, the role of marketing is witnessing a fundamental shift in the organizational ecosystem. With rapidly evolving customer demands, increasing reliance on technology and automation, marketing today, is truly a multi-disciplinary function. Marketers have no choice but to be more technology-enabled than ever before.

However, constantly incorporating new elements into a marketing program can be onerous for marketers. So, how do you respond to these challenges? How do you create a flexible and adaptive marketing model? How do you interact with customers in a more meaningful way? How can you be more agile than ever before?

Successful marketing leaders realize that their in-house marketing expertise is limited, and with an increasing focus on digital media, localization, and personalization, marketing teams often lack the required skill set or resources to comprehensively deal with every aspect of a campaign. This particularly rings true if you are a small-medium business (SMB) or a startup – you simply cannot afford to invest all your resources and personnel into marketing execution. In-house marketing teams at smaller organizations need to focus on their strategic goals and core business needs.

What is Marketing-as-a-service?

As with other business operations such as customer service, sales management, product management, that have found their way into cloud CRMs, Marketing-as-a-service (MaaS) has emerged as a concept that fills in the gaps for businesses looking for assistance in developing marketing strategies, campaign creation, and execution.

While marketing automation has been around for a decade now, its growth in comparison to automated accounting or CRM has been relatively slow. Why? Well, because marketing relies heavily on asset creation, and automation tools and platforms have limited value to offer when it comes to original asset creation. So, how do you scale your marketing asset creation? Think outside the box, or in this case, outside the organization. Marketing teams can benefit greatly from having external marketing resources. These resources can provide insight and perspective, dedicate time for projects and the right skill set to enhance the execution.

In the age “on-demand” everything, MaaS is perh

aps the closest as it gets to “on-demand marketing”. The concept of MaaS involves creating a blueprint and framework for marketing campaigns and then deploying these unique elements as building blocks for individual campaigns. Describing the idea, Ashley Friedlein, Founder of Econsultancy says, “If we can create marketing components that we can assemble on demand, then we can deliver new marketing experiences quickly and effectively.” MaaS could turn out to be quite the game changer for smaller organizations by providing marketing resources and assets on demand, scalability, and deep skill sets in execution.

     

 (How is MASS different from The Agency Model)

Is MaaS a turnkey marketing solution for SMBs?

Sure, technology takes a lot of grunt work out of marketing, but it’s not a magic formula that will solve all your problems, at least not on its own. To extract optimal value from a tech solution, you need to think strategically about its application – where do you deploy it? How do you derive maximum value from it? How do you ensure adoption across all levels within your organization?

For instance, a sales management solution will provide the best results only when you build the right strategy around it. So, you still need people with core skill sets in your marketing team. Similarly, to get the best out of your marketing-as-a-service move, you need to identify functions that are essential to your operations and the non-strategic functions that you can outsource.

With marketing teams at smaller organizations being overworked and understaffed, one of the major pain points for an individual marketer or department is that their role is really omnichannel and all-encompassing. With multiple channels requiring attention, including digital, events, broadcast and print, marketers or departments are forced to spread themselves too thin to manage all these tasks in-house. So, who is MaaS for? Martech thought leader and Principal at Raab Associates, David Raab says,

“Teams that lack the skills and/or time do the work for themselves. This is most often small companies including start-ups.  But larger firms also often run into resource constraints, especially when they’re trying to launch a new product, enter a new market, try a new channel or technology, or do something else that is beyond the experience of their existing staff.  There’s no particular reason to worry about losing control of data since ownership is very clear in the contracts.  There’s a more realistic concern about losing the in-house skills to work with the data, which does make marketers very dependent on their agency partners. But this is acceptable so long as there are multiple agencies to compete for the business, and enough in-house understanding to manage the agencies

                    

 

 

So, does this imply that the entire marketing function should be “operated as-a-Service”?

Absolutely not. However, as SMBs and startups looking to scale their operations, non-strategic marketing functions will move towards marketing-as-a-service.

Speaking about how MaaS could benefit marketing teams, TopRight CEO, Dave Sutton says, “Marketing technology is a dilemma for most marketers not only because it requires mastery of technology skills that are uncommon amongst marketers, but also because it takes a lot of time and energy to build an effective and scalable marketing system to execute your strategy. At TopRight, we take a holistic view of marketing systems. It’s not just the technology platforms, but the people and processes behind it that bring it to life. In our MaaS work, we are sure to include programs for helping our clients build out the internal teams needed to take on this opportunity themselves. A lot of clients view this as a daunting task, and if you don’t go about it the right way it can be. We work to help clients put the right talent behind the technology systems that they need to activate their strategy. It is just as important to help them implement best in class processes, so marketing results can continue to progress with agility.”

For Dave, it’s important that any marketing team deploying MaaS puts down the conditions for success in place to achieve results, he feels that marketing technology success is more about social science than it’s about computer science!As the scope of marketing expands, opportunities for marketers will grow to include many specialized job functions. And MaaS could very well be the next big opportunity for both organizations and marketers to explore. Speaking about how MaaS could impact marketing, David says, “It’s certainly an opportunity.  Many marketing teams don’t have the resources to use modern technologies to their

          

fullest, or to work across the wide range of channels now available.  Marketers with technology skills are still relatively rare, although becoming more common.  Such people still have no worries about finding work, so MaaS is certainly not a threat to their livelihood.”

With new technologies constantly disrupting the marketing landscape, it is going to be difficult for companies to acquire all of the marketing expertise they need within their organization. More so, in the case of SBMs and startups, for which a large marketing team will be an extremely expensive investment. MaaS is most certainly a game changer for such organizations.

4 Ways MaaS Improves Marketing Execution:

While an in-house marketing team may know their brand inside out, an outsourced team generally has niche specialties when it comes

to marketing operations and execution. Here are four ways a MaaS solution improves marketing execution:

• Expertise: When you hire a MaaS service provider, you bring their expertise and skill sets to your marketing team. Working with various companies across verticals, your MaaS service provider brings substantial experience in the marketing niche they operate in.
• Perspective: In-house marketing teams and the leadership are so closely involved with multiple campaigns that it is difficult for them to measure and analyze all that’s going on. Measurement and analytics are crucial for marketing teams, and with a MaaS program, you can easily identify and reinforce the best practices in efficiency and cost savings to generate ROI from marketing operations.
• Flexibility: We’ve seen it before for other organizational functions, flexibility trumps the need for continuity.Managed cloud services have streamlined operations for IT, human resources, accounting, and now we have marketing on the cloud too.As marketing increases its reliance on real-time opportunities, MaaS allows companies to capitalize on these opportunities as they arise. The more agile your marketing is, the more likely you are to engage your audience with current, relevant messaging, and the more likely you will gain some traction with that prospect.
•  Productivity and Time Management: In addition to improving the execution workflow, there are many ways in which MaaS helps create efficiency within marketing departments. When your team focuses only on their core responsibilities and strategic initiatives, they deliver higher productivity with better time management.While MaaS helps with the pain points listed above, it is also important to remember that bringing on too many outside resources can also be counter-intuitive. Your marketing team still needs to coordinate with each resource to successfully execute marketing operations.

 

Choosing the right MaaS solution

Choosing the right MaaS solutionOpens a new window for your business is key to stretching your marketing dollar and the success of your marketing ops. A good place to start is by evaluating the needs of your organization, where you are suffering from poor execution, missed deadlines, and inefficiencies. Dave opines, “If the focus of a MaaS initiative is to just implement a set of tactical initiatives for a client without asking ‘why’ and quantifying expected returns, you should ‘hit the pause button’ on that project. It’s tremendously important for a MaaS firm to not just understand your brand story, but they need to have a full understanding of the strategy driving the tactics and the measures to evaluate success. A MaaS firm must also fully understand and holistically evaluate the current client systems in place. This is not just about assessing the current tools, data and platforms that may be in place – it’s about assessing the people, processes and performance that will be enabled through that technology.”

Speaking about what you need to look for in your MaaS provider, David says, “Technical resources are still probably the hardest to find, especially for high-end products like Oracle Eloqua.  So, a MaaS vendor needs to ensure it has enough of those to support its clients.   More broadly, they need enough people to execute whatever services they’re offering, whether those include technology, strategy, analytics, content creation, or whatever.  (Although content creation is relatively easy for a MaaS vendor to outsource.)  Beyond the basics, they also need to understand how to run an agency properly, which takes a degree of organization and process greater than is needed to run most company marketing departments.  And they need the new business generation skills essential for any agency business: it’s very common for agencies to grow based on a handful of clients and then face a crisis if a big client leaves.  Having a pipeline of other clients ready to replace the inevitable attrition is essential for long term growth.”

To conclude, marketing-as-a-service, if deployed in the strategic context outlined earlier, will have a definite impact on performance, scalability, and flexibility, providing marketing leadership with the necessary room to innovate, experiment and grow.