They created heart-shaped chocolates and a
beautiful gorgeous menu and sent us wonderful
visuals which we could leverage in the media and
we put together a whole campaign around
Valentine’s Day. The campaign had many touch
points including a survey: we surveyed users on
social media channels and the fans of the airline
about the most romantic places that they would love
to visit and propose, and then we got the responses
of the survey and we turned this into an article
which we then pushed out through normal media
channels. The campaign was a massive success
because the media loved this whole approach and
we got tremendous media coverage. The airline
experienced a big lift in ticket sales and the
campaign reinforced their overall positioning which
was about “widening your world” and connecting
people.
It just goes to show that the information exchange
between channels and being open to different
creative ideas can lead to powerful campaigns that
elevate a company’s performance on all fronts.
SMM: What about outsourcing these departments
such as social media, outsourcing your PR? There
are some companies that are outsourcing their sales
as well.
HG: I see great benefits to it. I don’t know if
outsourcing your sales is a good idea for a couple of
reasons. If a sales person has a specialty in a certain
industry, it is important for this person to sell
exclusively for your company and not work with
competitive products. Unless you have an in-house
dedicated sales team, it’s very difficult for your
company to grow. As far as the public relations and
social media are concerned, it is definitely helpful to
have in-house teams, and we work with many PR as
well as social media digital teams of our clients.
However, there is tremendous benefit in bringing an
agency onboard to help you increase your reach.
First, in a well-established agency, there are
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5 Strictly Marketing Magazine September/October 2014
resources including analytic tools, media data-base
subscriptions that may be very cost prohibitive for
a company to have.
These resources are changing and being updated
continuously and it is tough for a company to mimic
an agency’s structure unless they are ready to make
a major investment. There are also synergies that
exist within an agency that are very tough to achieve
in-house. Let’s say, within an agency, a team
member is on a separate, non-competitive account
and is working on a tech product, and has an
opportunity from Wired magazine to showcase
client’s products in a gift guide. That person will
immediately go to another team in our agency that
works with another client and say, “Hey, do you
have any products that can really fit into this tech
story that I’m working on with my contact?” We call
this cross-pollination in our industry and it really
happens well with agencies our size. I think the
challenge of having and staying with an in-house PR
team is that it’s difficult sometimes for them to have
that kind of synergy and reach because they’re
working within one vertical and one industry. So
their exposure to the kind of contacts that an agency
could have stays limited. The other benefit to the
company is obviously less liability. Once you start
hiring staff, you have obligations to that team.
Whereas an agency, you have a year to year contract
with several month termination clauses. If you’re
not happy with the performance of the agency, you
could change agencies. You really want to work
with an agency that is at the forefront of the
technology and what’s happening in that industry,
that’s keeping up with the trends. In social media,
you get lots of customer service issues and
complaints, but having an outside source that is also
handling their PR provides extra firepower and also
helps them to approach projects in a much more
integrated way. Before making decisions on inhouse teams, you need to ask yourself some
questions. Where are you in your company’s life
cycle? Are you big enough to start hiring the staff
members full time and how could you also create a
great balance with your in-house person and the
agency?