Our Digital Outsourcing Survey Results Are In!

digitalArbor recently concluded a survey of marketers and agency executives at agencies and corporations across the United States. Although there have been plenty of 2011 marketing prediction studies and reports published in recent weeks as we enter the New Year, we tried to take a slightly different approach. We set out to learn more about the “little secret” many companies and agencies have been keeping, production outsourcing. Over the next few days, we’ll share the results with you.

To help shed some light on this topic, while understanding that many agencies do not want their participation to be well known, we anonymously polled in-house marketers and external agency executives across more than 16 industries. The respondents worked with clients across a range of industries, financial services (36%), retail (25%), healthcare (24%) and consumer technology (22%) markets.

We asked a range of questions to learn more about what their production strategies past and anticipated. We asked about outsourcing experiences and partnerships, what has been successful – and what haven’t worked so well.

The primary reason that agencies and corporations turn to outsourcing is to access skills and resources they do not have in house (89%). The majority of respondents have turned to outsourcing for non-creative project elements, such as digital production, operations and maintenance, which according to the a recent 4A’s report, can account for up to 60 percent of total campaign effort. The top three outsourced digital projects include website development (77%), digital display ad banner and rich media development (63%) and e-mail marketing (44%). Other commonly outsourced projects include microsites and landing pages (35%), Web operations and maintenance (34%), social media applications (30%), mobile marketing (23%) and application and tool integration (20%). Stay tuned for the next post on key outsourcing challenges.