Unless your office holds all the people on earth, it’s not possible for a single business—or a single team within a business—to own every expertise, skill, or capability you might need. And if you’re smart (which clearly you are, since you’re reading this), you know that today’s complex marketing challenges are constantly evolving. The problem you solved yesterday may look very different next week.
So what do you do when your team needs help thinking through obstacles and executing new solutions on an ongoing basis? In the past, many businesses, from start-ups to Fortune 500 firms, responded by outsourcing their complexities to full-service agencies. The appeal is understandable: Here, take my problems, solve them, and let me know when you’re done. Over time, as more market complexities emerged, the services offered by these agencies—and the scale and scope of work they did—ballooned.
These days, the realities of modern marketing no longer align with a 100% outsourced model. More and more businesses are recognizing the downsides of hiring full-service agencies:
We’ve developed a better way to leverage the benefits of having an external partner without all the downsides. We call it bolting on.
At the outset, we pair a member of our team with a member of your team. Now you’ve got two heads solving your problems together: We bring diverse, scaled expertise that’s relevant to the work you need done. Your team member brings their own expertise, as well as key insights into your business and goals that no external partner can ever replicate.
Successful modern marketing is highly technical and hands-on. It’s not enough to have great ideas—you need the ability to execute those ideas, learn from them, and refine them. By bolting on to your team, we actively tackle work side-by-side, which improves outcomes, generates better thinking, and leads to increased performance in the future.
Women’s fashion brand Apiece Apart built a loyal following with its elevated basics designed for versatility. But their old email marketing platform was the opposite of versatile: It lacked tools for dynamic audience segmentation, behavior analysis, and Facebook data integration. As part of an ongoing engagement, P+S strategist Emily identified this as a roadblock to Apiece Apart’s goals—and knew a more sophisticated platform would drive growth.
Brands often avoid adopting new tools, even valuable ones, because the learning curve seems daunting. Part + Sum’s unique way of working solves that problem: Emily sat side-by-side with Apiece Apart’s stellar director of marketing and ecommerce, Grace Mack, to figure out what they really wanted from the new system. Then, they worked together to create updated marketing flows and processes, which brought the new platform online and gave the client the skills they needed to tinker and test on their own. In conjunction with that, Emily helped Apiece Apart learn how to factor in Facebook ad data, allowing them to start gathering critical insights about their customers directly. This opened the door to experiments with ad platforms beyond Facebook, including Outbrain and Pinterest.
Developing smarter, more efficient ad spending plans has paid off in more ways than one. As of September 2019, Apiece Apart had surpassed its performance for all of 2018, and continues to discover new opportunities to grow. And by pairing rich data with flexible marketing tools that allow for continuous testing and feedback.
