If you’re struggling to fill marketing positions or meet your marketing goals, it might be time to look at the benefits of outsourcing marketing.
Outsourcing marketing is quickly becoming recognized as a viable way for startups and SMEs to execute sophisticated marketing strategies without overstraining their resources. It enables businesses to offload marketing activities to external professionals who have the specialized knowledge, skills, and experience needed to drive results.
Is outsourcing the right choice for you? To help you find the answer, we’ll explore some of the benefits of outsourcing marketing and discuss how you can implement it into your business.
When you outsource marketing, you hire an external agency or freelancer to handle some, or all, of your marketing activities.
Let’s say that you’re struggling to manage all of your social media accounts. You could outsource the job to a social media marketing professional, essentially giving them the keys to your socials and letting them create content for you.
Or, let’s say that your blog content isn’t generating traffic. You might hire an outsourced content marketing agency to develop and execute a robust content strategy.
Lots of businesses have turned to e recruitment to source and hire high-quality employees. And it works. So, why would you outsource marketing to a third party when you could hire full-time employees?
Moreover, considering the substantial costs involved in hiring, including advertising, screening, training, and ongoing salaries, not to mention potential expenses like business loans for expansion, outsourcing can offer a more cost-effective solution.
The benefits of outsourcing marketing
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Gain access to expert knowledge
Building in-house teams of specialized marketing professionals is time-consuming and costly. Plus, it’s common for skills and knowledge gaps to persist as in-house teams struggle to keep up with evolving trends, technologies, and demands.
When you outsource marketing to agencies, you essentially partner with a team of experts who live and breathe marketing. As well as possessing extensive industry knowledge, skills, and experience, they have the resources to stay up-to-date with the latest trends. And, they have access to the industry-backed data needed to drive continuous innovation and improvements.
Additionally, outsourcing marketing also opens doors to specialized services that may not be feasible to maintain in-house, such as a business proposal creator. Thanks to this expertise, you can execute the freshest strategies to give your business a competitive edge.
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Improve overall cost-effectiveness
The average cost of hiring an employee is $4,700, according to SHRM research.
Image created by writer, data sourced from SHRM
Advertising, screening, and interviewing, are just a fraction of the fees. There’s also the cost of onboarding and training, which amounts to around $1,071 per learner. And then you’ve got the lost productivity of marketing managers to consider as well as technology investments and ongoing costs like employee salaries and benefits.
All of this to say—outsourcing to an agency is a much cheaper option.
Outsourcing involves hiring an entire team of marketing experts rather than one individual employee, typically at a lower cost. You don’t have to provide training or benefits, or purchase as many expensive technologies. So, you can enjoy serious long-term cost advantages.
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Leverage advanced tools and technologies
Marketers rely on a vast amount of tools to execute strategies. Marketing analytics technologies, design tools, CRMs, media monitoring tools, marketing automation—we could go on and on. Accessing all of these tools (especially as a startup or SME) is costly and requires a fair amount of onboarding.
So, one of the most enjoyable benefits of outsourcing marketing is that you get access to these tools without having to purchase them yourself. Agencies use the most cutting-edge tools and technologies to deliver the best results to their clients.
Once again, this gives you a competitive edge.
For businesses that don’t have the budget to undergo complete legacy application modernization, outsourcing to access the most up-to-date technologies is a step in the right direction.
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Enjoy more scalability and flexibility
Outsourced marketing gives you the flexibility you need to enter new markets or launch new products with less risk. Lots of agencies specialize in specific areas, allowing you to access the expertise of a whole team of industry professionals who can guide your growth strategy.
And if you want to scale down, that’s easy, too. Your marketing efforts can be scaled up or down in response to immediate business needs without the stress of having to release employees, remove technologies, or downsize offices.
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Increased efficiency and prevent employee burnout
Of all the benefits of outsourcing marketing, increased efficiency was considered to be the most important in a recent study by Upcity. This is hardly surprising—a marketer’s to-do list is painfully long. There often aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done, which can result in lowered productivity, employee burnout, and unmet goals.
Image Sourced from Up City
Outsourcing unloads marketing tasks onto external professionals, improving the efficiency of your in-house operations. Let your internal marketing team leave the stressful, complex, and technical stuff to the specialized agency. Instead, they can focus on core business competencies, strengthening the foundations of your marketing strategies to help maximize returns.
You also increase efficiency in the recruitment process. Tech recruitment systems are a big help if you want to source employees, but it’s much easier to find and onboard outsourced teams.
How to implement outsourcing into your business
Are you overwhelmed by SEO? Can’t afford to hire a fully-fledged marketing analytics team? The marketing areas that you choose to outsource will depend on the specific challenges and pain points you’re facing. Luckily, there’s a huge selection of services to pick from.
Fractional Chief Marketing Officer
Instead of hiring a full-time CMO (which may not be affordable for startups or small businesses), you can hire a fractional CMO.
Fractional CMOs are outsourced chief marketing officers with the extensive experience needed to deliver strategic leadership and guidance. They lead core marketing operations and help you establish a framework to generate business growth. They can also onboard marketing teams onto powerful tools like business management software.
Email marketing
Designing and writing high-quality emails takes time and effort. The majority of marketers (22%) send 2-3 marketing emails every single day, while 21% send emails daily.
Image sourced from Hubspot
Outsourcing email marketing is a good option for businesses that lack the internal resources to send consistent, high-quality emails. Plus, outsourced services can help you enhance your email marketing strategy by implementing things like automation, customer segmentation, and drip campaigns.
Outsourcing enables the seamless integration of personalized email initiatives that closely align with individual customer preferences and behaviors. By harnessing outsourced providers’ capabilities to personalize emails effectively, businesses can unlock greater potential for conversion and long-term customer loyalty.
They can also help you run compliance audits. What is a compliance audit? It’s an in-depth evaluation of your company’s adherence to regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Basically, it makes sure that you’re not sending spam and that you are following the laws when it comes to unsubscribes.
Content marketing and SEO
Consistently writing content for your different platforms is a time-consuming task. And it’s only a fraction of a content marketer’s workload.
Marketers need to create content strategies, manage content calendars, keep up-to-date with SEO, perform competitive analysis, and more. Outsourced content marketing and SEO agencies can take on these tasks, leveraging their specialized expertise to drive results.
Let’s say you want to generate more traffic to your website using content marketing. An outsourced agency can:
- Perform key SEO strategies, such as keyword research, to help your content rank better on search engines.
- Write engaging content to attract more customers.
- Keep up-to-date with the latest customer and market trends.
- Optimize your content calendar.
Public relations
In startups and small businesses, marketing teams tend to take over PR responsibilities. However, it takes specialized skills and knowledge to effectively maintain a positive brand reputation across different media. When internal marketing teams lack this knowledge, consider outsourcing PR duties.
Enlisting the help of a third-party PR agency gives you access to professionals with extensive networking expertise. They understand the nuances of communicating with journalists, editors and publishers to achieve the desired results. This could be anything from attracting media awareness to generating a buzz around your new product or improving your brand’s reputation.
Marketing analytics
Marketing teams rely on data to inform business strategies. But here’s the thing about data in marketing—there’s a lot of it.
Analyzing marketing data can quickly overwhelm internal marketing teams. But full-time marketing data analysts are pretty hard to come by. Outsourced marketing analytics services analyze your data for you, identifying trends, patterns, and insights that are delivered to you in ready-made reports.
Social media marketing
Maybe managing all of your different social media accounts is starting to overwhelm your team. Or, maybe your current Instagram strategy isn’t driving the growth you want. Whatever the case, you can outsource the job to a social media marketing agency or freelancer.
Armed with specialized knowledge, agencies can channel 100% of their efforts into managing your social media. Their services might include things like:
- Developing a social media strategy.
- Crafting on-brand social media content.
- Executing social listening.
- Creating a social media content calendar.
- Completing competitive analysis.
- Monitoring and reporting on social media analytics.
You could also outsource the role of social media manager. An outsourced social media manager can not only leverage their expertise to drive results, but they can train your current employees. This enables you to promote internally in the future with less risk.
Conclusion
The success of your business depends on marketing—but managing it all yourself can quickly become overwhelming. For businesses that lack the time, budget, and expertise to handle all of their marketing activities, outsourcing is the perfect solution.
By enlisting the services of a specialized agency, you can leverage the vast expertise of a team of professionals. Equipped with in-depth knowledge and cutting-edge technologies, they can execute the strategies you need to meet your marketing goals.
So, is outsourcing your marketing the right choice? Hopefully, this article has helped you see where outsourcing might work in your business.
