Every company understands the need for marketing, and how marketing leads to and is essential for success. Unfortunately, not every company is in the position or has the capability to field a full marketing department, or even marketing team. The temptation to tackle the task of marketing alone is understandable, but it can often be overwhelming, with where to even start being a huge question that is hard to answer. This is where outsourcing comes in. Outsourcing your marketing processes or hiring on specialists, even calling in consultants can seem like a hard sell. This article aims to show why you should consider outsourcing your marketing processes.
Reduce Overhead Costs
A key reason any company should start considering outsourcing marketing functions is cost management concerns. When you bring on additional permanent staff to push your products/services, you are adding to your operating costs, and thus away from your total profit. Furthermore, hiring skilled professionals capable of meeting your demands and goals is another expense to consider. Far cheaper to find professionals who you can bring on board only when necessary.
Another significant benefit to outsourcing business functions is moving a substantial chunk of your expenses from operating costs to variable costs. Your monthly budget becomes far more flexible. This is especially important for smaller companies that may be trying to reach new markets, or provide new services/products. The ability to follow through on essential marketing functions like creating content, website development, and search engine optimization without the need to lock in the additional budgeting for a fixed salary and benefits that a properly funded marketing department would need is a real point for marketing outsourcing, allowing for flexibility and scalability in projects and campaigns of any size and scope.
You need to prioritize where your budget goes, and marketing may not be the first priority for the majority of your operating costs. In-house marketing teams being forced to produce the same if not better results with less resources is a dicey proposition. In situations where the wallets are light, it makes sense to outsource key technical functions like website development, branding, and video production. By engaging with the appropriate professionals for these functions, organizations can stay flexible while also maintaining a high quality look and feel for their brand.
Access to professional expertise and best practices
Your company may have specific goals and ambitions for your marketing strategy, but lack the time and resources to successfully do it. Or perhaps your company offers the cutting edge in products, or the best services, but doesn’t know how to reach the right customers and help them know this. It goes without saying, but a marketing strategy requires clear storytelling and strategic alignment with your brand.
Let’s take the owner of a bakery as an example. Though certainly an expert in the preparation and creation of any baked goods, he or she may lack the knowledge or resources for marketing their baked goods in a way that would build brand awareness and attract new customers. This is where outsourcing your marketing comes in.
By outsourcing your marketing efforts, you place your work in the hands of professionals who have devoted their careers to helping businesses like yours succeed, and that possess the skills and manpower to make it happen. From developing a brand identity and redesigning your website, to crafting a content marketing strategy or a social media strategy. A marketing agency can bring to your company the professional expertise and best practices of the industry, all without you having to learn them yourself.
Access to tools and technology
As time goes on, many traditional modes of business have become increasingly more digital, especially in this post-Covid world. The technology and skills needed to execute to adapt to these changing circumstances have become increasingly technical and precise. What's more, these technologies are constantly changing and improving rapidly, making it hard to keep up. As your business grows, you might find that your in-house marketing team may lack the expertise needed to utilize these digital tools to the fullest. Or you may not have the spare budget to subscribe and have the latest necessary software's and tools
By outsourcing your marketing functions, you sidestep this problem. The outside professionals will have the skills, tools, and expertise with those new tools and technologies needed to coordinate and execute marketing campaigns comprehensively. Even better, you won’t even need to pay for the technology, just for those professionals to help you with it.
New ideas, Different perspectives
A less obvious but key benefit of outsourcing your marketing is the ability to tap into unique perspectives and objective points of view. Oftentimes, in-house designers, content creators, and analysts can have the “this is the way we’ve always done it” blinders on when looking to solve company business problems. By bringing in external resources to help with creative, branding, and content, you tap into the ingenuity and inventive ideas of unbiased experts.
You may feel like you know your audience but you can’t truly put yourself in their shoes. You may be too closely connected with your product or service to separate your emotions in order to see it the way a customer will. Outsider perspectives can be necessary to evaluate your strategies without bias.
Swift Scalability
Finally, another reason you might want to outsource marketing is the need for rapid growth. For some businesses, their growth is dependent on cutting down the time-to-market. When it comes to planning and executing the tactics for launching a new brand, repackaging a product, or developing a content strategy for your organization, timeliness is a chief concern.
It would almost certainly take significant time, effort, and energy for an in-house team to be assembled to support these functions. Both human resources and your management would need to identify, recruit, hire, and educate new team members. In this case, it’s a smart move to outsource marketing to a cross-functional team that is already assembled, proven successful, and ready to hit the ground running.
In conclusion,
You should outsource your marketing as it is a great way to cut costs, to cheaply and quickly access professional expertise and technologies, as well as the invaluable presence of outside perspectives. It is also a flexible way to accommodate business growth.