These days, marketing rarely sleeps. Campaigns run 24/7 across multiple channels to engage consumers. Technology trends rapidly transform tactics. Volumes of data require analysis to unlock insights. For both B2B and B2C marketers, flexibility and agility are now baseline necessities, not nice-to-haves.
Yet many marketing teams struggle on limited budgets with constant pressure to do more with less. Expanding headcount or martech budgets simply isn‘t feasible. Maintaining excellence across a spectrum of advertising, analytics, social media, content and more becomes an immense challenge.
This is precisely why outsourcing marketing activities to specialized providers – also known as Marketing as a Service (MaaS) – has entered the mainstream. Top analysts like Gartner forecast the MaaS market worldwide will exceed $3 billion by 2024.
Put simply, MaaS givesresource-constrained marketing leaders an edge in today‘s ultracompetitive, digitally-driven business landscape. It serves as a force multiplier for growth.
An Introduction to Marketing as a Service
MaaS refers to bundling various marketing offerings into a single pay-as-you-go managed service. This encompasses everything from strategic planning and campaign creation to technology implementations and performance analysis.
Leading MaaS providers possess specialized expertise across key disciplines – be it PPC or web analytics, design or public relations. They integrate seamlessly with in-house teams to address existing skill and workflow gaps.
The depth of talent and breadth of services allow businesses to scale and adapt marketing programs in alignment with objectives. All without large investments, risks or lag that traditionally accompany building expanded in-house teams.
"MaaS frees us from constant hiring and tool evaluation struggles so we can focus on big-picture brand strategy while still tapping into the latest innovations as needed." – VP Marketing, Fortune 500 Medical Devices Firm
As explained by Jeff Bezos, Amazon deploys two pizza teams – small groups that can be fed with just two pizzas – to enable speed and agility. Top MaaS agencies effectively function as an army of such specialized, best-in-class marketing teams tailored to every client challenge.
Quantifiable Benefits of Adopting Marketing as a Service
The real-world value derived from MaaS adoption spans tactical improvements and long-term competitive advantage:
1. Hard Cost Savings
Consolidating marketing efforts with MaaS providers has been proven to drive 30% to 60% cost reductions. This represents millions in savings especially for enterprises.
Such efficiency is enabled by shared resources instead of individually building capabilities in-house across paid media buying, data analytics and more. Cloud-based tools further minimize infrastructure expenses.
Marketing budgets can be rechanneled towards amplifying campaigns and sales initiatives rather than mere operations.
Savings from marketing services consolidation [Source]
2. Operational Improvements
By tapping MaaS agencies, best practices around campaign execution, lead management and technology utilization are built-in. The collective expertise and workflows reduce slip-ups while increasing consistency across programs.
Productivity typically jumps over 50% as staff can shift from doing tasks to focusing on high-level strategic objectives. Approval cycles may shrink from weeks to days, accelerating campaign velocity.
3. Enhanced Innovation
The cohort model and specializations found in MaaS teams stimulate more breakthrough thinking compared to siloed in-house staff. Marketing ideas get stress tested through more lenses leading to clever implementations. With no internal politicking, radical concepts see the light faster.
Access to an array of latest martech tools facilitated by MaaS partners serves as an incubator for innovation too. Experimentation costs drop dramatically.
4. Deeper Customer Insights
By aggregating campaign data across the clients of a MaaS agency, rich insights can be derived through benchmarking and pattern analysis. Trends become apparent. Persona and segment strategies get refined. Such holistic intelligence is impossible to gather internally.
So whether pursuing greater ROI or customer centricity objectives, businesses gain an information edge from MaaS collaborations.
5. The Ultimate Marketing Extension
Perhaps most importantly, MaaS provides immense scale on-demand without drastic restructuring. Marketing capacity, creativity and consistency spike almost instantly compared to adding internal headcount or platforms.
The fluid assignments and ease of spin up/down gives marketing leaders dynamic flexibility difficult to attain otherwise. MaaS essentially serves as a "cloud-based" extension of marketing.
Inside the Stack Powering Top MaaS Providers
What exactly enables MaaS agencies to deliver such outsized results across critical disciplines like branding, digital media and campaign creation? Their specialized technology stack plays a key role in scalable delivery:
Creative and Content
MaaS creative teams leverage digital asset management (DAM) platforms like Bynder and Widen to develop videos, images, copy decks and other branding material. Top connectors to Adobe Creative Cloud streamline designs. Some also tap AI content composition tools like Wordtune and Jasper.io to boost productivity.
Advertising and Intelligence
Consumer intelligence fuels campaign development and tactical media buying. Here, data management platforms (DMP) integrate insights from analytics suites (e.g. Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics) with CRM data. Location intelligence and foot traffic patterns also assist targeting.
Media activation relies on robust PPC tools (Kenshoo), social and display campaign managers (Sprinklr), and omnichannel orchestration engines (Acoustic).
CX and Commerce
With digital engagement so crucial, MaaS teams leverage comprehensive CX stacks encompassing site testing (Optimizely), personalization (Evergage), campaign analytics (Indicative), chatbots (ManyChat), ticket management (Zendesk), and more.
Headless commerce backends like Commercetools and Elastic Path integrate with frontend frameworks like React and Vue.js to optimize customer experiences.
Core components across top MaaS platforms
Such end-to-end capabilities coupled with vigilant optimization is why MaaS partners consistently outperform individually managed in-house solutions. They effectively "roll up" an enterprise marketing stack into a single agile team.
MaaS in Action: Driving 5X ROI for Leading B2B Tech Firm
To showcase MaaS impact, here is a 2021 customer example from DEPT®, a prominent digital agency and B2B martech company with over 1,500 employees globally.
Business Objective: Flawlessly integrate multiple newly acquired companies and boost global brand visibility.
DEPT® turned to their own MaaS professionals for:
- Consolidated web presence reflecting unified branding
- Centralized campaign creation and analytics
- Target buyer persona research
- Integrated CRM and sales enablement systems
By leveraging MaaS services spanning design, development and data science teams, DEPT® achieved impressive results:
- 5X increase in marketing originated pipeline in under 12 months
- Launched targeted campaigns across 15 countries backed by rich persona insights
- Streamlined collaboration between global creative, content and strategy groups
- $8.3 million in influenced pipeline revenue attributed to marketing campaigns
- Multi-geo capable digital analytics foundation established
- Improved sales productivity by 200+ more qualified leads per month
Such outcomes exhibit why a "startup style" MaaS approach fuels superior marketing adaptability and ROI compared to traditional models.
Key Components of an End-to-End MaaS Experience
For enterprises pursuing the benefits of MaaS, what should you expect from a platform partner? Here are seven core capabilities offered by leading providers:
| Marketing Discipline | Activities Delivered |
|---|---|
| Advertising | Paid Media Planning and Buying, Campaign Management, Performance Tracking |
| Web Experiences | Experience Design, Content Development, Personalization, Testing |
| Commerce | Segmentation, Journey Mapping, Loyalty/Affiliate Programs |
| Martech | Adoption Roadmaps, Implementation Services, Customizations |
| Analytics | KPI Reporting, Attribution Modeling, Activation Platforms |
| Creative | Video Production, Graphic Design, Interactive AR/VR Content |
| Marketing Ops | Budgeting/Billing, Resource Management, Technology Admin |
Evaluation criteria span functional expertise, global servicing capabilities, workflow integration complexity, and cost transparency.
Top MaaS platforms provide one point of coordination across all critical areas above rather than disjointed solutions. This enables seamless blending with in-house staff for amplified outcomes.
The Path Ahead: MaaS Critical for Competitive Survival
MaaS adoption remains relatively low today – under 25% penetration across enterprises as per most industry estimates. Yet it is primed to skyrocket as modern demands make hybrid models integrating internal and outsourced marketing teams indispensable.
Significant competitive advantages will accrue to ahead-of-curve adopters who activate MaaS for enhanced scale, productivity and innovation.
“Specialist skills enabled by MaaS agencies today will shift from nice-to-have to must-have very soon. Businesses that drag their heels risk outright obsolescence.”
So whether dealing with skills mismatches, limited bandwidth or constantly evolving social/mobile landscapes, marketing leaders now have an proven way to dynamically flex their capabilities. Just as enterprises rely on best-of-breed SaaS apps across finance, HR and other functions, MaaS delivers a turnkey suite of future-ready marketing solutions.
Unlocking such potential requires embracing resources, ideas and technologies outside enterprise walls, not fearing external partnerships. The MaaS revolution has arrived. Forward-looking teams are already onboarding this impressive network of marketing talent and technology.
Maximize your marketing ROI in 2023 by scheduling a custom MaaS capability briefing today with our experts.
