By Mary Knight, Partner/Executive Creative Director
It’s a balance you face every day. Do you coordinate the efforts of various marketing partners and assign everyone their little slice to save budget and conserve resources? Or do you pull your partner(s) in early and often into the planning process so their efforts are built with a full understanding of your company’s marketing big picture?
Having worked extensively under both scenarios, and having seen the resulting work as well as the price tags, there’s a strong case for marketers to consider an approach commonly used to make other financial decisions: Total Cost of Ownership.
As you know, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is a financial estimate intended to help buyers and owners determine the direct and indirect costs of a product or system. When incorporated in any financial benefit analysis, TCO provides a cost basis for determining the total economic value of an investment.
It’s a straightforward concept in many areas. But translating TCO to evaluate marketing strategy and deployment? The quick math is easier than you think. When we’re fully up-to-speed on the big picture, we can apply that knowledge to every decision we make for a client—allowing us to not only create and deploy tactics immediately, but also look on the horizon for ways we can leverage efficiencies across multiple platforms in the future.
Which means, not only do you get answers to the assignment at hand, you get ideas and assets that can live far beyond the initial assignment. For example, a standalone TV spot or online video is just that: a standalone. But when ideated with longer-term goals in mind—social cut-downs and posts, web content, digital advertising extensions, even internal communications and training—a standalone project suddenly has dozens of uses and deployments. Your overall cost to communicate per piece goes down dramatically. And the “handshake” across your customer journey becomes stronger as well.
These days, marketers are charged with managing the big picture of paid, earned and owned communications, along with hundreds (if not thousands) of other responsibilities. The good news is, in the long run it almost always pays (financially and in terms of message quality and continuity) to bring your agency in sooner versus later.
Marketing TCO: It’s a strategy both a CMO and a CFO can love.
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Opinion