Whether you’re a small business just getting started or looking to scale up or you’re an established business launching a new product, you need to get the word out. But sometimes this is easier said than done. Successful marketing requires the right budget, the right talent, the right amount of time, and the right tools. It’s an investment, and it can become overwhelming when trying to manage the other, seemingly more important demands of running your business.

While large corporations with huge pools of resources to draw from can usually find a way to manage their marketing well enough, small to medium sized businesses often struggle. DIY options usually aren’t very effective and hiring a team, paying for tools, and trying to balance the time end up costing more than expected for mediocre results.

Marketing as a Service (MaaS) may just be the answer you’re looking for to kick your business off with a great start! Let’s find out why:

MaaS, otherwise known as outsourced marketing, is the process of delegating your business marketing practices to a specialized outside agency. An excellent MaaS provider will customize your marketing strategy to fit your unique business needs and utilize various channels to reach your target customers. They will also provide you with ongoing reports and suggestions for the services you receive, so you can measure the results and reap the benefits without taking away vital resources from your other business operations.

This avoids creating and delivering budget presentations to the executive team hoping for enough financial support, hiring for an effective marketing team, completing training, developing and implementing a marketing strategy, obtaining various marketing tools, etc., etc. All these processes are taken care of through your MaaS provider, all at a fraction of the cost and with huge time savings for your entire team!

Let’s dig in deeper to the benefits of Marketing as a Service. Here are 4 ways MaaS can help your business today:

Evolving technology has complicated marketing. Gone are the days of relying on classified ads, fliers, and short radio commercials to get the word out. And it isn’t that those avenues wouldn’t have some small worth; it’s that the channels through which your customers expect to interact has expanded and become more instant.

Most shoppers are online in various ways before they ever enter a store or make a purchase these days. They’re doing Google searches, checking social media, watching for emails and newsletters, browsing through websites, scrolling through their phones, sending instant messages, and tweeting reviews… and with the expansion of ways your customers expect to find you comes an expansion in costs.

Hiring enough team members with the skills to harness these new marketing strategies efficiently and effectively is costly. Remember, not only will it take at least a few employees to cover social media marketing, website design and development, mobile marketing, email marketing, SEO, and on; you will also have to train those employees and pay out the benefits most employees expect today.

Additionally, there are the costs of additional office space to accommodate your team, resources and amenities they may need throughout the workday, equipment expenses, software expenses, office expenses such as paper and art tools. Finally, there’s the costs of actually placing your ads digitally, creating and sending mass emails, managing a database of contacts, obtaining an integrated and mobile friendly website… The costs add up quickly and often times the budget proves too overwhelming for smaller businesses to manage.

The benefit of trusting an outsourced marketing agency will definitely show in your pocketbook! An experienced and trusted MaaS provider can absorb all these costs into their own business at a fraction of the cost, usually payable at convenient intervals such as monthly or quarterly. They already have trained experts for your various marketing channels and the software to manage many processes with great success.

Local SEO is similar to regular SEO in the sense that it aims to make your business more visible in search results. The difference is, local SEO only puts you into competition with other similar businesses in your vicinity as opposed to regular SEO, where you’re competing with the entire internet! Obviously, this improves your chances of being seen when users search for businesses like yours.

This has become the preferred method for prioritizing listings at Google, and many other browsers are following suit -- mostly, because search results local to a user are more relevant to them. The trouble is, many businesses still aren’t optimizing their website or business listings for local SEO, especially small to mid-sized companies.

Not every agency offers this service; but at Inline Marketing we take a special interest in helping businesses market locally, where they will see the most success. And we make Google in particular a major focus, not only because they are the leader in this kind of marketing strategy, but also because they offer robust tools to put your business front and center. With Inline Marketing and through Google, you can get an optimized Google My Business profile that will showcase your business in search results. Google My Business offers features such as click-to-call, online appointments, services and menu sharing, featured reviews, and even the ability to post news, updates, and product offerings from your business.

At Inline Marketing, we can help you gain all the marketing benefits in this article and more. So, if you find you could use a little help with your marketing strategy and you think Marketing as a Service might be a good option for you, schedule a free consultation with us today. We’ll discuss your unique needs, answer any questions you may have, and help to guide you to the best marketing solution for your business.