Inbound and
Digital Marketing Insights

The one constant in life is change. For a marketing agency to stay ahead in the branding game, change shouldn’t just be acknowledged — it needs to be embraced.

Clients don’t generally see the first drafts of the ideas presented for their approval. What they see are the pitches: some not so great, others worthy enough to win critical and customer approval—but all having weathered the buffeting winds of revision upon revision.

Last week, we discussed how to take the first steps in outsourcing marketing or creative processes. One of the methods we suggested for vetting a potential outsource provider is running a pilot project with them. Pilot projects offer more than a chance to test new partners, however; they can test new methods, platforms, or even audiences. This makes them useful to marketing teams and agencies of any size, at nearly any point in their endeavors.

Take some time, first of all, to appreciate where you are. You’ve made a decision—and as any Hamlet can attest, decisions aren’t easy—and what’s more, it’s a decision that will significantly shape your business’ trajectory. How exactly it shapes it, however, depends on how you follow through.

One of the more infamous characters in Philippine literature is the Picaresque Juan Tamad. Juan, whose moniker is Filipino for ‘lazy,’ is a young man who tends to get in trouble for corner-cutting ploys. In one story, he is tasked by his mother to bring some crabs home for dinner. Too lazy to carry them back in a bucket, however, he decides to release the crabs and have them scurry on home ahead of him.

Risk management is important for any company to survive for long periods of time. It doesn’t matter if you are a creative agency, marketing agency, or in retail, your business will encounter crises. While damage is inevitable, the magnitude can be minimised with risk management. This is the system that, put into place, shields your company from internal and external harm as much as possible. If your company plans to last longer than a couple of years and not be completely devastated in a single swoop, then you should be looking into risk management.

A lot of social commentary these days argues that people these days have shorter attention spans. The results of HubSpot’s Consumer Behaviour Survey for Q1 2016 seem to agree: when asked to describe their content consumption habits, respondents only cited two forms out of ten that they “consume thoroughly” (i.e. read, watch, or listen from start to finish) as a habit.

“Time is money,” goes the old adage, and this can be taken literally when it comes to outsourcing pricing schemes. The question of whether to outsource work full-time at a fixed monthly rate, or by-the-hour is one of that comes up often. Some say full-time resources allow for a broader scope of work, but others find such arrangements inflexible. On the other hand, some clients hesitate to entrust sensitive processes to outsiders who work for other clients.

Human Resources do a lot of work. They build the framework of the company, swell the ranks of the business, maintain employee satisfaction, and train people for leadership positions—all at the same time. They’re centred on people, and in all corporations, people are the backbone of your success. But still, theirs is an unsung duty.

People today are rarely stationary—they’re always moving, constantly on the go, and, wherever you find them, they probably have somewhere else to be. This may seem like a bad thing for businesses, especially those that only have physical stores to begin with. But in reality, this is a blessing in disguise. The constant flow of foot traffic can now be taken advantage of if you know how to do it. If you don’t know how, well, lucky for you -- we do.

The contemporary labor force are infamous for their professional polyamory: serial short-term stints with employers whom they ditch at the first sign of a better offer. How much of this is myth and how much is reality is subject to debate, but it’s worth noting that Microsoft has shelled out billions of dollars to acquire LinkedIn, a social media platform whose very premise is, as New Yorker writer Nathan Heller says, “that it is possible to flirt with a C.V.”