Marketing is the lifeblood of any company, and failure to appreciate this fact may result in empty aisles bereft of customers, lackluster sales, and anemic business growth. Even knowing these facts, however, many businesses are incapable of understanding when their best marketing efforts fall short of the goal. A number of reasons might account for this cognitive dissonance.
Lack of marketing experience, the proverbial “you don’t know what you don’t know,” leads many small business entrepreneurs to make this fundamental error. As a culture we sometimes eschew the conventional wisdom to avail ourselves of outside expertise in favor of our own opinions and actions.
However, these outside agencies play a crucial role, so you must recognize when it’s time to engage an external market research company to sharpen your advertising message and grow your business.
Fear of Losing Control of Marketing Process
One of the primary concerns for business decision makers who choose to keep their marketing efforts in-house, as opposed to outsourcing those efforts to an external market research company, is the fear that the results will not represent company goals, objectives, or the insider knowledge of a company employee. As an expert within your industry or field, it is easy to look at the efforts of outside marketers as lacking in insight regarding what makes your business tick in terms of the information you need to successfully outreach to your buying public. Fear of losing control over the marketing process therefore serves as a cause for inaction and analysis paralysis when it comes to recognizing this critical business need.
The Risks of In-House Marketing
Unfortunately, for instance, the employee you hired on to manage your IT department, and subsequently tasked with developing your marketing strategy, simply might not have the skill sets associated with achieving the marketing goals your company needs to meet to be successful. Marketing research emanating from amateur efforts can have lasting effects beyond the waste of time and resources for the effort.
The Cost of Misguided Marketing
Erroneous information collection efforts can indeed produce misleading data, leading to the development and implementation of poor strategic decisions. Another problem with assigning a current team member to solve your marketing challenges is that diverting them from their regular duties can create a lost opportunity, as their original responsibilities will remain unfinished.
As with any business decision, choosing an external market research company depends on what best supports your firm’s bottom line. In terms of a cost benefit analysis, will the rewards of engaging an outside research vendor for comprehensive marketing information outweigh the costs of losing creative control of your marketing message?
Selecting Your External Marketing Partner
Once your company’s decision makers decide to engage an external marketing vendor, the selection process resembles the start of any professional relationship. While even the most casual of Google searches will display a myriad of available options, both with large and small firms, on your internet search page, you will want to fully vet the organization to see if they will meet your exact needs.
Peer recommendations, reviews, and business ratings provides a clue as to the character of your potential partner. Review their business history with an eye towards longevity and financial stability when selecting your vendor. Simply stated, a long term marketing research project can span the better part of a calendar year and you will want to make sure that your new partner is likely to be around when that final month concludes.
Once you have pared down your list of candidates, visit with each organization you are considering with detailed questions regarding the breadth of their services. Be as specific as possible when outlining your needs, and determine how they plan to keep you in the loop as they move towards your stated goals.
For instance: will they appoint hands on managers who directly keep you informed with interim reports and weekly updates as the project progresses? Will the department head and lead researcher author the final report, or will they hand off the results to a junior staffer to write the details?
Finally, assess the corporate personality of the external marketing company to help determine whether they culture aligns with that of your own for a seamless interaction between the two teams.
Specific Information Leads to Specific Outcomes
For best marketing results, you need to be clear in your objectives and transmit those goals to your outside marketing vendor. For instance, are you exploring the possibility of a new product line, or focusing your efforts on carving out a niche in a competitor’s market? This strategic vision will guide the research efforts of your outside marketers, so being as specific as possible in your requests guarantees quality results.
These goals will inform the research efforts of the team, and subsequently result in the research methods that are appropriate to your strategic visions. Options include focus groups, secondary journal research, interviews, surveys, or some combination of these options. The reliability of this data and its overall applicability to your business model depend on the informational gathering system they adopt.
Making the Big Decision to Outsource
Making the decision to outsource your marketing research efforts to a competent external marketing vendor can pay huge dividends with a targeted effort that aims to answer your specific marketing goals.
Knowing the proper questions to ask, and the options available for turbo boosting your informational gathering methods will make the decision to hire (or not to hire) outside professionals that much easier. Hiring an outside market research company makes sense as soon as you recognize the need for information and find it more cost-effective to pay someone else to handle the heavy lifting.
