Why an Australian / Filipino blended marketing team works

Managing a blended marketing team may seem complicated at first, but with the right provider and resources, your business could benefit greatly from it.

So what exactly is a blended marketing team?

A blended marketing team consists of both onshore and offshore team members. When managing a blended marketing team, it is important to keep track of your team’s output.

A common concern often raised by businesses when considering an offshore element is how a team can work effectively across borders. We’ve been running a blended marketing team for 5 years now with great results.

Here are the 4 main reasons why an Australia / Filipino blended marketing works, so well:

• Language and culture

• Task distribution (onshore and offshore)

• Improved efficiencies

• The results speak for themselves

So why the Philippines?

English and Tagalog are the two main languages in The Philippines; and the large majority of business is conducted in English. Apart from the language similarities, The Philippines has a close cultural proximity to western, English speaking countries like Australia and the U.S. Because of this, Australia and The Philippines have quite a lot in common in terms of doing business. Hence why we chose The Philippines as our outsourcing location.

Read more on why The Philippines is the number 1 outsourcing location in the world.

What stays onshore and what goes offshore?

To ensure the success of a blended marketing team, it is crucial to determine which tasks remain onshore and which tasks are sent offshore. For example, at Beepo all content creation and marketing management is kept onshore. Although Filipinos are competent English language speakers, their written English does not lend itself to an Australian audience. Strategic planning and high level project management also remains onshore as these skills are not easily found in the Philippines. And from a marketing strategy point of view, what works in the Philippines won’t necessarily work in western markets.

While content creation is mainly kept onshore, we have made sure that our offshore team is managed by a Marketing Team Leader. The Marketing Team Leader is responsible for workload management and the output of The Philippines team. Briefs are forwarded to the Marketing Team Leader, who then delegates jobs to the appropriate team members. Offshore roles generally include:

• Marketing Assistants
• Graphic Designers
• Video Graphic Editors
• Web Developers
• Digital Marketers
• Software Developers and so on.

Below is our Marketing Org Chart that shows the blend of both Australian (AU) and Filipino (PH) staff.

Improved efficiencies

Over the years we have trialled many different lead generation tactics including outbound appointment setting and a content driven, inbound strategy. We have found the content driven approach has resulted in much higher conversion rates; indicating better quality leads. However, the challenge with content marketing is that it is extremely resource intensive; which requires significant investment for a business to do properly. This is where an offshore team focused on implementation and execution makes sense. The following stats speak for themselves:

The results speak for themselves

From 2016 to 2017, Beepo experienced over a 104% increase in leads generated. Additionally in just the first two months of 2018, after having our content-led marketing strategy fully implemented, we managed to generate 50% of our 2017 revenue - a massive improvement! With a working strategy in place the focus remains firmly on maintaining lead generation volumes and improving sales conversion rates.

Creating a successful blended marketing team is not simply about engaging an offshore outsourcing provider and letting the ‘magic’ happen. You need to put systems and processes in place to manage workload and outputs. That is why we have created a series of templates designed to help businesses build and manage their own blended team. If you genuinely want to build a world class marketing function then download ‘Managing a Philippines-based Marketing Team’.