
Service catalogues are not at the centre of most marketing conversations right now. Why would they be? Not many marketers know what they are, and let’s be honest, the term sounds pretty boring. Marketers are more interested in campaign optimisation, proving marketing ROI and figuring out the best way to implement AI tools, which are far more topical or impactful, and are more likely to ensure immediate job security. But there again, you could say the same about a service catalogue.
What is a service catalogue?
The name is both self-explanatory, and a little misleading. In the simplest terms, it’s a list of services that are made available to customers (external service catalogue), or users within your own business (internal service catalogue). This might be in the form of a list, or database of services that a user could request on a website, an internal intranet page, or any other request process.
But there’s a little more to it than that, particularly in the marketing context. Yes, it might take the form of a list of marketing services that you make available to the rest of your business stakeholders – such as to request a customer event, sales materials, or a promotion, for example. You may already be doing this today. But there’s another level of sophistication to a service catalogue that most marketing organisations aren’t using. This is where the catalogue is an internal tool, used and managed by your own marketing people to execute their own marketing activity.
In this case, the catalogue is broken down into a range of atomic sub-components that can be used to assemble any marketing activity. This could be a list of tasks, processes, activities, or assets. Examples of things that might be in a service catalogue might be:
Copywriting
Video production
Graphic design
Web page publishing
Campaign planning
Media buying
Target list pulling
You may already have some sort of catalogue in place, particularly if you use an external agency. Often as part of a retainer arrangement, agencies will present clients with a list of services that can be requested. They may have an indicative lead time, and perhaps a cost estimate. This is not your catalogue, however. This is the agency’s catalogue that you are requesting services from.
Alternatively, you might have your own internal list of broad activities. However, often in marketing organisations, where they exist, these tend to be broad brush categories of activities with quite loose definitions, such as ‘small campaign’ or ‘outdoor campaign’, or similar, which might be used as templates and for doing budget estimation. While it’s perfectly ok to bundle tasks in this way in your catalogue, bundles are hard to reuse unless someone wants to do the exact same thing again.
A good internal service catalogue will aim to contain a set of reusable components that are:
Clearly defined and categorised
Standardised
Have a clear delivery timeframe
Have a clear cost (or definition of effort)
Have clear quality or service level definitions
Indicate who is responsible for delivery
Why Bother with a catalogue?
This might seem like a lot of effort to do a lot of marketing activities that teams seem able to manage already, why bother? Surely this is just adding another layer of complexity that isn’t necessary?
A few years ago, I would have tended to agree. However, the massive explosion in marketing workload, the constant focus on marketing accountability, the proliferation of channels, the dilemma of in-housing v’s outsourcing, the big shift to performance marketing, and the emergence of new technology is forcing change. This change will be felt both within our in-house teams, as well as the agencies we work with.
The situation today is that many marketing organisations are overloaded with work, a growing amount that work is repetitive and task heavy performance-based activity. AI is being introduced in both within in-house marketing teams, and in agencies, with a lack of clarity about what value is being provided by people and what is provided by machine today, and what it will look like in the future. This can make for a fairly chaotic landscape in which it’s hard to be confident you are making the right choices. It’s probably why over half of marketers worry about burning out in their current role.
A service catalogue is the first step in bringing order, efficiency and repeatability into marketing, while providing a means to work out how to manage issues such as AI automation, in-housing and managing the mix of brand v’s performance marketing in a informed way.
How does a catalogue achieve this?
Think of your master catalogue as bit like the kitchen in a restaurant. Inside it are all the ingredients needed to make the dishes on your menu, along with the recipes, skills and equipment necessary to turn the ingredients into an output.
You have a set of common requests which come from the menu – for example there may be a ‘product launch’, ‘production of product brochures’, a ‘direct mail campaign’, or a ‘lead nurturing campaign’. These are things you do on a regular basis, but with some variations in audience, channel, or audience. For each of these things you have a recipe which defines which ingredients are required, how they are prepared, therefore what equipment is needed, and who is needed to prepare it. You know how long it takes for prep, so you know the delivery timeframe and you know what it costs.
With this information you know when prep needs to be done (lead time), you can plan how service is run in the kitchen so there are no bottlenecks for people or equipment (your marketing operations), You have a clearly defined standard (quality), and you know what price it should be on the menu to generate enough return (your marketing ROI).
In some cases, you may not have the capability in-house to do all these things yourself. For example, maybe you don’t have a pastry chef, so any dishes with a pastry element, you outsource to a local pâtissier (your agency). And maybe you buy bread from a local baker, because it’s cheaper to buy in than make yourself (outsourcing). In these cases, the elements are still in the catalogue, you just know that they’re provided by someone else.
Each day you may temporarily add a couple of dishes to the specials board (new activities), these use items that you already have in the catalogue (i.e. you already have the ingredients and people with the skills to deliver the activity). In this case, you’re assembling a new service from the components you already have. Every season, you may review your menu. You keep the most popular dishes, remove the less popular ones, and introduce new dishes. This will mean adding or removing ingredients from your master catalogue.
Now think about your marketing team. They take raw ingredients like copy, brand, video, graphic elements, data analysis, commercial offers, or media planning and assemble them into different marketing activities. The exact specification will be modified by the channel they are used in – for example, product copy for social will be much shorter than it might be in a printed brochure or a product video.
So far this is not rocket science. But once this approach is in place, it opens a huge range of possibilities for better management of your marketing operations:
Better Briefing
Now your briefing process can become more structured. Brief writing can specify the exact elements that need to be brought together to deliver the marketing activity. You can specify the size (number of segments, contacts, or markets), the complexity (multi sequence, multi-channel, audience), duration, and optimisation required. Or you may leave this up to your agency or it might be automated – more of that later. You’re able to collect data on what’s being requested.
Improved data collection and insight
With a catalogue structure and request process in place, You can analyse your marketing operations from beginning to end – how much of each activity is undertaken? What’s the mix between brand and demand gen? Which brands are most active? How similar are the activities requested? Which elements are in most demand, and which are least used? How often are they reused? How long does each element take to deliver? Which teams or agencies deliver on time, which are frequently late? Which ones deliver good quality, and which don’t? Which stay on budget and which don’t? Which activities are associated with better ROI, and which often fail to deliver a return?
Marketing effectiveness
Armed with the right data and insight, you can begin to build a knowledge base of which marketing elements, channels or activities work best for each customer segment. These learnings can be built back into the briefing process. Today there are AI tools for email campaigns that can suggest optimal subject lines based on previous customer behaviour. Now think about applying that to an entire briefing process, where the brief writer creating a campaign can be prompted to select the optimal channel mix, or content based on previous learnings.
Marketing efficiency
One of the big payoffs of using a catalogue is that it can be used to massively increase marketing efficiency. By looking at the individual elements, you can begin to optimise your marketing operations for efficiency. Which activities are causing bottlenecks and need to be better resourced, and which ones shouldn’t. You can begin to make choices about whether you do work in-house or get a third party to do it. Importantly, it gives you a framework for managing automation.
Workflow management
There has been a recent explosion in the use of workflow management tools in marketing organisations. This is done to try and get on top of the complexity of of delivering sophisticated marketing activities. However, while these tools are helpful, without standardisation, many of them are reporting on wildly differently defined activities, meaning it's hard to understand what good really looks like when it comes to efficient and effective delivery. By breaking the delivery down into standardised components, it becomes much easier to compare activities and report on performance.
Implementing Automation and AI
By breaking your marketing activities down into consistently defined elements, you can begin to make decisions about the implementation of AI and automation tools. You can make decisions about which activities, tasks or processes can be automated and which ones can’t. By understanding which tasks are most used, you can prioritise your automation to focus on the activities that deliver the best bang for buck. Suddenly you have a structured roadmap for automation, and can understand how it impacts efficiency and effectiveness, and therefore your ROI.
Changing agency relationships
Once of the most significant impacts of running a catalogue is that it provides an avenue for reshaping agency relationships. Three quarters of brands want a change in how they pay for agencies. Brands are recognising that paying for their agency based on FTE inputs is an outdated way of charging for services. Often it makes it hard to understand if the brand is really getting value for money. Furthermore, as agencies adopt AI, clients aren’t even sure if the person they are paying for is actually doing the work. The FTE model also doesn’t really incentivise an agency to innovate or become more efficient.
A service catalogue changes all of this. The opportunity is to shift agency to an output or outcome-based model, depending on the level of relationship you have with them. If you typically ask your agency to complete tasks, such as ‘produce copy’, then you’ll focus on an output-based model. But if your relationship is higher level, such as the production of an entire campaign, then you’ll probably want to introduce a success element in the remuneration model.

Setting yourself up for the future
Marketing has become hugely task orientated in recent years. The introduction of automation and AI tools will replace a multitude of repetitive tasks that currently form the bulk of marketing activity. Marketing teams will need to shift from ‘how’ to do things to the more strategic questions of ‘which’ things need doing and ‘why’. As tasks are automated, marketing teams need to plan for the transition to being more strategic, both in terms of people and skills. By implementing a catalogue, you can develop a clear plan for which tasks will remain human centric, and how you organise your marketing teams to fulfil them.
It's essential to own your own catalogue
I often hear brands say “Oh, our agency has a catalogue of services we can choose from”. This is the agency’s catalogue, not yours. In this situation you’re buying off the menu, you’re not controlling your kitchen. Owning your own catalogue is essential to ensure you are working consistently, with clear definitions over price, quality and delivery timeframe. It’s essential to be able to measure marketing performance. It’s essential to retain your learning and continuous learning. It also gives your far more flexibility to change agencies if the existing one is underperforming, without disruption to your existing operations. You can move the delivery of items in your catalogue to a new agency, while retaining the same definitions, and hopefully the same or better price, time, or quality parameters.
From chaos comes order
The concept of a service catalogue is neither new, nor is it complicated to understand. Yet it is probably one of the best things you can do to bring order to your marketing operations. By managing and reporting on the activities you undertake as a marketing team, you can not only deliver better marketing performance, but you also put yourself in a strong position to implement automation and AI adoption in a controlled way, and reshape your teams to be more strategic and less operational.
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