The Case for Marketing-as-a-Service

For years, businesses have had two familiar ways to build their marketing capabilities. Hire an internal team or outsource the work to agencies and freelancers.

Both have their place. Internal teams offer proximity to the business, institutional knowledge and continuity. Agencies provide specialist expertise, additional capacity and access to skills that may be difficult to recruit.

But as marketing has expanded across brand, content, performance, technology, social media and customer experience, the distinction between these two models has become less useful.

Businesses increasingly need the strategic ownership of an internal team, the specialist capabilities of an agency and the flexibility to scale resources as their needs change. Yet assembling all three can introduce considerable cost and operational complexity.

This is the opportunity for Marketing-as-a-Service (MaaS).

Not another agency retainer. Not a collection of freelancers. And certainly not a way to outsource responsibility while keeping the management burden.

At its most useful, MaaS is a different operating model: an integrated marketing function that combines strategic leadership, specialist expertise, technology and execution within a flexible, ongoing service.

The case for it isn’t simply that businesses want to spend less. It’s that the traditional ways of organising marketing don’t always match the way marketing now needs to work.

The economics of doing more with less

The pressure to rethink marketing isn’t theoretical. It’s reflected in how marketing leaders are managing their budgets.

According to Gartner, its 2025 CMO Spend Survey found that marketing budgets remained at 7.7% of company revenue, unchanged from 2024. More tellingly, 59% of surveyed marketing leaders said they lacked sufficient budget to execute their strategies. Meanwhile, 39% planned to reduce agency spending, and an equal proportion intended to reduce labour costs.

These figures describe large, global organisations, not the South African businesses that might be considering MaaS. They nevertheless illustrate a broader management challenge: marketing leaders are being asked to deliver against ambitious strategies while scrutinising the cost of the resources required to execute them.

For a growing business, the challenge can be even more immediate. A full internal team may be financially out of reach, while multiple agency retainers can quickly become difficult to coordinate. Hiring one specialist may solve an immediate skills gap, but leave several others unresolved.

MaaS offers a way to approach that equation differently. Rather than buying individual services or building every capability permanently, a business can access a coordinated set of marketing capabilities through an ongoing engagement.

The commercial proposition is straightforward: pay for an integrated marketing capability without necessarily carrying the full cost and complexity of building one internally.

So, what is Marketing-as-a-Service, really?

At its simplest, MaaS is an ongoing marketing service in which a business pays a monthly subscription fee for access to a coordinated team that takes responsibility for delivering its marketing.

Not just advice. Not just creative work. Not just media buying.

The team gets involved in deciding what needs to happen, doing the work and understanding whether it’s producing the intended results.

Take a growing South African fashion retailer, for example. It wants to increase online sales, build brand awareness and improve customer retention.

Under a conventional arrangement, it might appoint a branding agency, a performance agency, a social media agency and a freelance email marketer. The retailer’s marketing manager would be responsible for keeping everyone aligned.

Under a MaaS arrangement, the retailer could have one team responsible for its marketing strategy, content production, social media, paid media and customer engagement. That team would work to a shared plan, coordinate its activities and report against agreed business objectives.

The retailer would still own its commercial decisions, product strategy and customer relationships. But it wouldn’t have to manage every marketing discipline separately.

The important part isn’t that all these services are available. Most established agencies can offer them. It’s that they are managed as one ongoing engagement, with shared priorities and clear responsibility for delivery.

MaaS is therefore as much about how marketing is organised as it is about what services are included.

Why the traditional models are becoming harder to justify

The choice between an internal team and external agencies has always involved trade-offs.

An internal team understands the business, has direct access to leadership and can build knowledge over time. But hiring a full team is expensive, particularly when the business needs several different specialisations. It can also take months to recruit the right people.

Agencies solve some of these problems. They offer access to specialist skills without requiring permanent appointments. However, when a business appoints several agencies, it inherits the responsibility of coordinating them. Even a single agency may require substantial client involvement and may focus more on delivering agreed outputs than taking responsibility for the broader marketing operation.

Neither model is inherently wrong. The question is whether it makes financial and operational sense for the business at its current stage of growth.

Consider the difference between employing a full-time performance marketer and accessing performance marketing as part of a broader service from an agency. If the business needs paid media expertise for ten hours a week, a full-time appointment may not make sense. But if it also needs strategy, creative production and social media, appointing four separate specialists could be equally inefficient.

MaaS allows businesses to access those capabilities through one engagement, with the provider allocating resources according to the agreed scope.

What the evidence tells us about the model

MaaS is still an evolving category, and there isn’t a single, universally accepted definition or a robust body of independent research proving that it consistently outperforms traditional marketing arrangements. However, examples of fractional and integrated marketing services offer some insight into how the model can work in practice.

Consider the published case studies from Elba Marketing in Australia. Its reported engagements include a consumer brand, Subo, which achieved 90% TikTok follower growth and more than 2.6 million views through a fractional TikTok management engagement. Another client, a B2B SaaS business, reportedly increased conversion actions by 222% year on year.

This illustrates that ongoing, externally delivered marketing capabilities can be structured around specific business needs, rather than being limited to conventional project-based agency work.

The wider lesson is that the delivery model matters, but the capabilities, execution and commercial objectives still determine whether the engagement creates value.

Where MaaS makes sense

MaaS isn’t necessarily the right answer for every business. Its relevance depends on the company’s size, ambitions, existing capabilities and willingness to work with an external team.

By contrast, a business with a mature, well-resourced marketing department may only need targeted external support. Another business with very limited marketing investment may be better served by addressing its basic commercial and operational needs before committing to an ongoing marketing service.

MaaS works best when there is enough marketing activity to justify an integrated team, a clear business need for that team and a willingness to make decisions collaboratively.

It also requires a provider with the capability and capacity to deliver the agreed scope. A service model cannot compensate for inadequate expertise or unrealistic resourcing.

The business case: From fragmented marketing to one accountable team

Consider a consumer business generating R1.25 million a month, targeting 10% month-on-month revenue growth. Its monthly marketing budget, at 8.5% of revenue, is R106,250.

Under a traditional model, that budget might be spread across an internal marketing team, multiple agencies and freelancers. The business pays for each capability separately and carries the management burden of making them work together.

Under PARADOX MaaS, the same budget funds one integrated marketing operation, with strategy, specialist talent, content production, media and technology coordinated under one engagement.

The commercial case: Instead of funding disconnected suppliers and carrying the cost of coordinating them, the business allocates 8.5% of revenue to one integrated marketing operation. PARADOX takes responsibility for the agreed marketing delivery, while the business retains control of its budget and commercial decisions.