The emergence of Marketing as a Service (MaaS) provides fresh new opportunities for marketing professionals, career switchers, and businesses. Here’s why.
Marketing as a Service, or MaaS for short brings the concept of managed services—which has been used by a host of functions including IT, HR, finance and accounting for years—to marketing, where execution and operational tasks are outsourced offshore to extend the capacity of your workforce, while internal staff focus on more strategic and high-value work.
By keeping strategic roles in-house, organisations retain control over marketing strategy and can ensure brand consistency across different products, verticals, and campaigns. By outsourcing execution work, organisations can bring scale, standardization, and cost efficiency to their day-to-day ‘Run’ activities.
Marketing leaders in mature markets like the US and Europe are starting to see the appeal of this innovative operating model, which allows them to reap the benefits of cost savings, dedicated expertise, skills for new technologies, and best practices without the additional need to train and onboard new resources.
By retaining a 3rd party to manage marketing execution, they can take advantage of experience garnered over many years across different clients and industries such as leveraging new marketing technology, managing the day-to-day digital advertising and email campaigns, running account-based marketing initiatives, and managing campaign optimisation and performance reporting. These are necessary components for a well-run marketing engine, but they are not core competencies for most businesses.
MaaS: Opportunities for impact and career growth
For these reasons, MaaS has become a very exciting space for those looking to develop a career in marketing. Take, for instance, 2X, a B2B-focus MaaS firm headquartered near Philadelphia, USA, with delivery operations in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Since its inception in 2017, with only 10 employees, 2X has grown to 300 employees with a three-year revenue growth rate of 759 percent. In fact, the firm’s biggest growth was seen at the height of the pandemic. And the company is still growing—the goal is to achieve a headcount of 1,000 employees by the end of 2023 to support new business.
What’s interesting is 2X’s focus on recruiting the best and brightest across all experience levels. Its delivery hub in the Taman Tun Dr Ismail suburb in Kuala Lumpur houses a world-class, diverse team of marketing strategists, developers, analysts, designers, and writers, among others, some of whom do not come from a B2B marketing background.“At 2X, we are learning-oriented, tech-savvy, and impact-driven. Our collaborative environment and diverse workforce enable us to quickly share best practices among our teams and recommend new ideas to our industry-leading clients,” says Domenic Colasante, CEO and co-founder of 2X.
“We have former engineers and finance professionals in our team, who bring with them analytical skills and the love of processes, to serve as analysts and marketing operations specialists. We have people with backgrounds in computer science and statistics who have found success at 2X as digital campaign managers.
“We have ex-journalists and editors who make some of the best marketing content writers with the innate ability to sniff out a story and connect pain points to solutions. We also have a fair share of former B2C marketing professionals who are now highly competent B2B marketers,” Colasante explained.
Producing marketers of the future
Marketing technology (MarTech) is such a game-changer. The market is moving away from the “spray and pray” tactic to more intent and intelligence-based marketing, and MarTech platforms are generally expensive and, therefore, opportunities to learn and leverage these platforms are far and few in between in this region.
However, with MaaS, companies like 2X—that operate in a mature and competitive marketing landscape in the USA—offer a totally different level of exposure and opportunity to work with some of B2B’s biggest brands who are market leaders in their respective fields.
“We are building a workforce of expertly skilled technologists that are getting the exposure and experience to work with next generation technology like 6Sense, Marketo, Adobe, HubSpot, Bombora, and Salesforce. And the fact that we equip them with the knowledge and tools right from the start cuts the steep learning curve considerably,” he adds.
The MaaS space is rapidly growing and evolving, meaning that the demand for talent will only increase. Those looking for a career that can encompass real commercial marketing, with exposure to demand creation and acceleration, data analytics, content operations, MarTech management, and more, will find that B2B MaaS offers a wide range of opportunities, which build on a variety of existing competencies and skill sets.
Industry experts believe that MaaS will be the next wave of change in marketing. Historically, marketing transformation has centred on the program, advertising, and technology budgets — no one had thought to rethink the labour side of marketing too. After all, the work that marketers do is just as important as the campaigns and technology components. Today, 2X remains a pioneering trailblazer in transforming the labour model of marketing to deliver greater value and impact on the business, opening a host of job opportunities to a diverse range of potential candidates in the process.
