Through the Looking Glass: Why You Should Outsource Your Marketing

One of the advantages of having an outside agency help with a company’s marketing efforts is the ability for the agency to peer inside the organization. From our experience, people inside an organization have a difficult time imagining just what it is that a potential customer is looking for, and how to communicate that they have a product or service that can help them.

Solid Marketing is the act of communicating your benefits, not what you do.

The big obstacle of an internal marketing team is what I’ll call the “industry bias”. This is the tendency to try to explain in painful detail everything that you do in your organization. Not only is this impossible, it misses the point about what people really want to hear.

People don’t want specifics. They care about why you are different and what you can do for them. Your “unique value proposition.” Strong branding and professional design go quite a long way in communicating benefit in 100 words or less. This is why good designers and marketers are more psychologists than artists. Usability research shows that a visitor reads at most, about 17% of a web page’s content.

It’s extremely difficult for a business to separate what it does from what it’s benefits are.

Let’s take an example, the insurance industry. If I’m searching for auto-insurance, chances are I am not interested in the organizational structure of your business. Nor may I be looking for a specific list of what you offer. I have to have insurance, so what I’m really looking for is how you’re going to take care of me. This is the message that needs to be carefully crafted through consistent and strong branding, good copywriting, and an even better execution. Only after you have made me feel like you really do care about my business am I likely to contact you. “Like a good neighbor”, right?