When internal talent is scarce and internal teams struggle to get campaigns off-line, outsourcing marketing tasks to a specialized third party can reduce the amount of operational pressure your team may face.
However, outsourcing is a big decision that requires financial commitment and a pleasant working relationship between companies. So if you have the bandwidth and budget, it might make more sense to do some tasks internally or use a combination of both.
There are three outsourcing options:
- Outsource your marketing completely
- Keep all of your marketing efforts in-house
- Use a combination of outsourced and internal marketing
The requirements differ between companies. The option you choose depends on your financial situation and the experience, capacities and skills of your current internal team.
Let’s examine the benefits of outsourcing your marketing efforts and find out which individual components of your overall marketing strategy are best suited for your brand to outsource rather than addressing them internally.
The advantages of outsourcing marketing
Time constraints, limited budgets, and even complacency can make it easy for even the best marketers to use familiar tactics.
However, for marketing to be effective, it needs to be innovative and engaging. So if you rely on the simple option, you’ll only get this far. Outsourcing connects you with marketing agencies that specialize in keeping up to date with new technologies and trends.
These professionals can offer an outsider’s perspective on your company and bring new, exciting ideas and strategies to the table.
In addition, maintaining an internal marketing team can be expensive and, depending on your marketing needs, often unnecessary. If you turn to third parties when you need marketing materials, only use the budget when it is necessary.
Suppose you work for a small business and want to post two blog posts a week on your company’s blog. Instead of paying an internal blogger to write full-time for your brand, consider hiring a freelancer to write these two posts a week. This is undoubtedly cheaper than the alternative. As your business grows, you can consider whether it makes sense to pay a writer full-time.
Over time, you can develop a firm budget that better reflects marketing spend in terms of requirements. With this budget, you can determine whether developing an internal team is financially profitable for your company.
If you’d like to outsource some (but not all) of your marketing efforts, we’ll look at a few different aspects of your overall strategy that you may consider hiring a third party to do the heavy lifting.
Content marketing outsourcing
Authoritative, informative content This positions your company as a thought leader and can work wonders for your bottom line. So what does it matter if it was written or designed by people outside your company? As long as these writers or creators are fully immersed in and understand the complexity of your company, they should be able to provide relevant, engaging content for your target audience.
If you want to outsource your content marketing efforts, you can choose an agency or a freelancer – websites like Upwork and Fiverr are great resources for entrepreneurs and allow you to review the work of a professional before committing to it.
look at it How to find freelancers for your company Find out more about how to find first-class freelancers for your company.
However, you may feel that your internal team understands the nuances of your company better. It’s good! A number of marketing tools and platforms are available to simplify content creation. For example: WordPress and its deeply functioning dashboard; Ceros with its collaborative, experience-oriented orientation; or HubSpot’s own marketing suite, which combines blogging, social media and website material under one powerful software solution.
Outsourcing marketing strategy
From tactics to lead generation to email workflows, a solid marketing strategy should cover all phases of the buyer’s journey. This important basis includes the development of buyer personalities, the assignment of campaigns to needs and the identification of growing market trends.
When you outsource your marketing strategy to a career specialist, contact someone who is responsible for keeping up to date with industry innovations and new, creative methods of marketing delivery. You can also identify audience demographics that you may not have considered before.
However, it may not be financially viable for your company to outsource the entire task to a marketing strategist. If this is the case, you can also commission a “strategy skeleton” on which your internal team can build. For example, the outsourced strategist defines your buyer personalities, and then your team adds the muscles and tendons to the bare strategic bones.
Marketing Analytics outsourcing
Your marketing information will be informed of how well you are using your data analysis. Many companies will find that they simply don’t have the internal know-how to gain insights that can turn marketing efforts into gold. In addition, recruiting and training an internal team of data scientists and engineers can be expensive and time-consuming.
However, specialized agencies can provide the expertise to interpret your data and provide data-driven insights in response to your existing analysis. They also offer a range of solutions that can be tailored to your budget and requirements.
Instead of straining your resources or incurring unnecessary costs, you can concentrate on developing outstanding products and offering exceptional service. You can fall back on the insights of your marketing secret service.
If you want to immerse yourself in Marketing Intelligence internally, check it out How Market Intelligence Makes Your Marketing Team Agile to find out if this is the right solution for your needs.
Email Marketing Outsourcing
Don’t want to clutter a prospect’s inbox or forget about it entirely? A successful email marketing strategy can make automation and personalization your secret weapon.
For example, hands-off workflows for maintaining leads can automatically trigger emails based on a user’s action – for example, when a user clicks on a social media advertisement or plays a video. By outsourcing the creation and setup of these workflows, much of the manual and administrative work is taken off your shoulders and placed in the hands of professionals.
If the internal route sounds like a better option, you need an infrastructure to facilitate the timed delivery of these emails, and an internal strategy and content team to develop them. HubSpots Marketing Suite provides an intuitive framework to outline your email workflow strategy and its automatic triggers.
Outsourcing of the social media strategy
Social House offers many advantages: Social media, for example, is one of the most direct options for your company to connect with potential customers and customers and to get in touch with them. By keeping social media in-house, you can hire full-time social media strategists who communicate with potential customers through social media, and then return that information to management to get more personalized, targeted brand messages in the future.
However, if you work for a smaller company with a limited budget, a full-time social media manager may not be available at the moment.
In addition, outsourcing can be an important task for you due to the power of social media. When done correctly, social media can take your brand’s reach and visibility to the next level. Therefore, you may want to outsource the industry to an agency with proven success.
You can also delegate certain social media tasks to a third-party group, rather than handing over the entire strategy to them. For example, you might notice that Instagram is a fantastic way to connect with leads, but your social media manager is also currently juggling with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, making it difficult for them to pay full attention to Instagram .
To tackle the problem, you can hire an agency that primarily focuses on everything related to Instagram, including Instagram advertising, posting on Instagram stories, and hiring Instagram influencers to promote your products or services to advertise.
However, if you don’t want to hire a third party agency for your social media needs, there are plenty impressive social media tools To help you automatically post across channels on a regular basis, use data to refine your strategy over time, and communicate with potential customers on a large scale.
Every company needs a marketing strategy that is tailored to its particular challenges. Some may find that outsourcing the entire marketing spectrum is right for them, while others may want to implement marketing technology and build a core team on it.
We recommend that you conduct the activities internally if your current marketing technology achieves an excellent ROI and you have trained, experienced marketing staff who are able to carry out long-term campaign work and ad hoc tasks.
You should consider outsourcing all of your marketing activity if your team members wear too many marketing hats, constantly miss appointments, or are more than supported by your current marketing technology.
A happy medium can be found using a mix of agency and internal resources powerful marketing tools. With an experienced third-party agency to guide you every step of the way, you can train employees and integrate new technologies without spending too much money or tackling a lengthy recruitment process.
If you’re having trouble making an informed decision, you should contact a consulting firm (like ours, Huble digital) to find out which software and skills can change your marketing efforts in 2020 and beyond.
