graphic courtesy of connectnigeria.com
Gini Dietrich’s Spin Sucks site has been in my industry news RSS feed for a long time. This week she wrote a good piece looking at how VISA has brought all their marketing and communications work in-house. The company is ending relationships with current agencies FleishmanHillard, Edelman and Brunswick.
In her story Dietrich connects this move to the trend of large companies merging their marketing and communications departments into one. FedEx, SAP and Allstate have done so recently. This move would seem likely to increase efficiency, but not necessarily lessen the need for outside vendors.
PR Week ran a story that questioned whether the existing internal staff was being asked to shoulder the additional load without any additional investment. Of course there is no way to know that from the outside, or if there was anything wanting in the performance of the agencies.
Personally I’ve seen content marketing efforts fail when taken in-house. When existing staff are given new responsibilities on top of current ones and no one “owns” the effort, it will usually not be a high priority. It’s also hard to not to become a little promotional in tone when you’re creating content from the inside.
My biggest takeaway from this news is that it reinforces the necessity of sales integration. On every engagement I’m actively working on direct contact with my client’s sales teams, making sure the content and promotion we produce is targeted towards prospects. Connections with sales helps craft what we write about, how we reach out to third parties and how we promote that content. The sales team uses the content as thought leadership collateral, and the process gets integrated into the sales automation process of the client.
It’s not easy, since it involves change, working with human beings and (usually) breaking down internal silos. But when you directly connect content with prospects and the sales funnel, you achieve the kind of integration these large companies are seeking.