Sept October Issue 2016 1 | Page 10

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 10 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?