The need for digital marketing
Marketing operations are essential to the survival of any business. As a small business, solopreneur, or independent contractor, you are responsible for ensuring that the right consumers know what products your business has available to meet their needs.
Whilst many businesses recognize the need for digital marketing, currently, the great majority of “small businesses have relied on an ecosystem of digital channels to operate nationally and internationally” – Hinrich Foundation.
Businesses that operate digitally also need the right policy framework to enable their ability to access digital productivity, payments, shipping and logistics, communications, marketing, and e-commerce platforms to join the new era of digital trade – National Foreign Trade Council.
However, when trying to analyze the marketing activities of a given company, we primarily understand the commitment that is needed from small business owners in order to compete within a global space – where content volume and algorithms are privately controlled, though contribute to meeting individual business objectives.
In Gartner’s most recent Marketing Organizational Survey for 2019, how marketing leaders structure their teams today and how they expect them to change over the next several years: 20% of respondents reported that they run some form of decentralized marketing organization today. By the end of 2022, however, a majority 51% expect they will have a decentralized structure in place.
The differences between centralized and decentralized provide a good indication of how to best decipher your marketing approach.
Centralized Vs Decentralized
Centralization
Centralizing marketing operations means creating a single “Center of Excellence” (COE) team that can handle all marketing operations. Since marketing operations require in-depth knowledge, the primary benefit of centralizing is having dedicated experts who can help manage time- and bandwidth-consuming projects.
Decentralization
Unlike a centralized team, a decentralized marketing strategy doesn’t require substantial investment in experts and training. Instead, you manage your team to develop some of the skills required, and they’re supported by an operations manager or small operations team.
Choosing between a centralized and decentralized approach will depend on the needs of your business.
Advantages and Disadvantages
Marketing departments typically have a mix of centralized and decentralized operations, however, many businesses often find that it is better to decentralize operations to serve the company – when communicating the core benefits of each of its products/services independently to preserve the identity and individuality and to make sure customers have clearly communicated the core benefits of the products/services without the disruption of the main brand.
When to Centralize or Decentralize Your Marketing
Evaluating the focus of your business towards implementing a different strategic marketing approach becomes inevitable, where current marketing activities can put your company at the stake of either establishing itself in the market or losing customers and ultimately your business.
The primary deliverable of any organization should be the focus on the products and services that it sells, and not selling what should be sold.
About One Source Direct
At One Source Direct, our mission is to help to create a level playing field for entrepreneurs across the globe.
One Source Direct is a collaborative business community with a mission to help level the business playing field for entrepreneurs across the globe.
Geared toward subscriber simplicity and usability coupled with a base mantra of What Does My Business Do and What is Somebody Looking For, One Source Direct is geared toward efficiency for small business owners.
Impact your small business networking experience by connecting your products and solutions to business leads. By creating a business profile on the One Source Direct platform, instantly network with a growing community of international business customers.
We are evolving the business networking space so that all small businesses and independent contractor communities have access to fairer commerce opportunities through a distributed source that users control.
Our community was built to help entrepreneurs like you that may lack the financial resources and human capital, to compete with larger companies.
Become an evolutionary entrepreneur by collaborating for success with an adaptive and disruptive online business community at One Source Direct.
To learn more, visit us at www.onesourcedirect.net
