Running a business is no small feat. It takes a lot of time, energy, and resources. And one of the most intense departments in any business is the marketing department. If you’re in charge of a marketing department, you’ve probably felt overwhelmed by the various tasks and duties effective marketing entails.
This is why it’s important for you as a marketer to outsource some aspects of your marketing.
In order for your marketing department to be more productive, it’s crucial that you outsource specialized marketing functions and keep the routine functions in-house. While it may be tempting to try and do it all by yourself, let me give you a few good reasons why outsourcing will help improve your productivity.
3 Ways Outsourcing Will Improve Your Marketing Departments Productivity
So why should you outsource some aspects of your marketing? Here are 3 simple, yet productivity-enhancing, reasons to do so:
1. Marketing is Complex
Marketing, in today’s world, is not easy. It involves a lot of different disciplines that no single person can master. Due to this complexity, it’s better to outsource each (or related disciplines) to ensure that you focus on the core issues. This will ensure that your marketing department produces results that help your business get closer to achieving its goals.
Besides complexity, marketing is fast-evolving and requires innovative and disruptive minds that can read the times and prepare your business for success.
2. Outsourcing Makes it Easy to Stay Abreast of Best Practices
We are living in a fast-paced world where everything is constantly evolving. When it comes to marketing, this means having to keep up with the ever-changing best practices for each marketing discipline. Doing so is time and resource consuming for an in-house marketing team as it will mean:
- Constantly training your team on the latest best practices
- Regularly updating your tools and software
The time and resources used to keep your team on point could be spent on other activities that will drive your business forward. And that’s why outsourcing such marketing activities should be a priority.
3. Reduce Your Fixed Costs
One of the biggest advantages of outsourcing some of your marketing is that it allows you to make huge savings on your marketing budget. A full in-house team will cost you more to run than you would spend by outsourcing some of the more mundane or complex marketing functions. This gives you the ability to be financially nimble, especially when experimenting with a new product or service.
5 Things Every Marketing Department Should Outsource
Now that you’ve seen the importance of outsourcing, what should you outsource to improve your marketing department’s productivity? Let’s quickly look at 5 marketing functions to outsource - and why you need to outsource them rather than keep them in-house:
1. Content Marketing
In years gone by, marketing mostly involved invasive strategies like TV ads, billboards, and many others. While these are still relevant, inbound marketing is playing a bigger role in generating a healthy ROI for businesses in today’s world.
One of the biggest ways of generating inbound leads is through the production and promotion of engaging and entertaining content. And even if you’re a subject matter expert, outsourcing this part of marketing is strongly advised because:
- It’s time-consuming. Creating exceptional content consistently requires a lot of time and effort. It also requires that the content creator be well-conversant with current content creation best practices - especially when it comes to promoting the content.
- Helps you to avoid tunnel vision. Tunnel vision is one of the biggest pitfalls in-house content creators fall into. Because of spending a lot of time around your product or service, your in-house content creation team may fail to see the big picture and miss some content opportunities in your industry.
Content creation is an art that requires total commitment. From creating articles for your own website, guest posting, creating video content and social media posts, content marketing has so many tasks. Trying to do it on your own could lead to decreased productivity - or worse still, lead to burnout. Outsourcing to an agency that specializes in this field will help you ensure your content achieves its goal of driving growth.
2. Email Marketing
Another critical marketing strategy that is best left to the pros is email marketing. One of the biggest reasons to outsource your email marketing is that your customers’ inboxes are personal. You need to handle them with the utmost care if you are to avoid losing valuable customers - or worse still, attract a lawsuit.
According to research, email marketing has the potential to give you up to $44 for every $1 you spend. But to generate those mouthwatering results, you have to:
- Know how to grow an email list
- Understand key metrics (data analysis) and know how to track them
- Email marketing is governed by laws that change regularly. It’s crucial that you keep abreast of them.
Email marketing is very demanding and needs no less than 3 people to carry out a campaign. This includes a graphic designer, copywriter, and data analyst just to mention a few. Employing people on a permanent basis for your email marketing campaigns will cost a whole lot more than you would spend by outsourcing. That, plus the headaches associated with running email campaigns, are good enough reasons to outsource this facet of your marketing.
3. Web Development and SEO
Having a user-friendly and fully functional website is no longer an option for your business. It’s a must. Your website is a major marketing tool that you need to invest heavily in so as to attract, engage, and convert visitors into customers.
That's why it's crucial to consider the best website builders, expert web developers and SEO professionals to work on your business website. Traditionally, that would involve creating an IT division to handle all of this technical stuff. Unfortunately, that would mean (apart from hiring trained personnel):
- Purchasing tools and equipment
- Regularly training staff on latest best practices
The world of web development and SEO is one of the fastest-changing industries. Keeping up to speed requires a team dedicated to the craft. And unless you’re running a huge company that can comfortably afford it, you’re better off outsourcing. Before outsourcing these tasks that need to be done, it would be a smart choice to do a detailed research and find a reliable custom web design company that will be ready to meet all of your expectations.
4. Research
Market research is a crucial marketing function that can determine whether your business thrives or fails. While there are many advantages of doing it in-house, the advantages of outsourcing far outway leaving it to your marketing team. For one, an independent market team won’t be affected by bias, thus making the results more credible. Other reasons for outsourcing research include:
- Saves tons of time
- You leverage the expertise and knowledge of the research company
- Participants are more honest with independent companies than they are with a brand they know
By contracting a research company to do the market research for you, your marketing department becomes more streamlined, thereby increasing their productivity. Finding a good company that can help you with this is not a hard task, as there are many great digital web agencies that you can choose from.
5. Paid Search
The world of paid search (strategy and execution) is another complex world you’re better of outsourcing.
Again, if you’ve got the budget to hire the staff required to run an in-house team you can leave it to your marketing department. However, one of the biggest disadvantages of this is that you’ll miss out on valuable insights that a PPC manager running different accounts at an agency would be able to bring to your campaign.
If your business depends on paid ads, outsourcing this facet of marketing has a number of advantages. Some of these include:
- More affordable. Most paid search agencies charge a fixed percentage of ad spend. This is more cost-effective than hiring a full team dedicated to running your campaigns.
- Faster execution. By outsourcing to an agency, you avoid corporate meetings that usually delays the execution of many campaigns.
With many brands getting low ROIs on their paid search campaigns due to stiff competition, outsourcing to experts is advisable.
Need Your Marketing Department to Be More Productive?
Marketing may not be the core functions of your business, but it’s still a critical factor that determines whether your business will be successful or not. This is why you need to ensure that it’s one of your most productive departments. In order to have a productive marketing department:
- Outsource as much as you can
- Encourage your employees to be more productive
- Track your daily activities to ensure optimum efficiency
Besides these 3 tips, you’ll also have to be innovative in your marketing. The world is changing fast, and only those who stay ahead of the curve will succeed. Here’s to a more productive marketing department.
About the author:
Shahid Abbasi is a growth marketer and CRO specialist at Cruzine. He helps individuals and agencies in digital transformation by improving their products' user experience, bringing them traffic, sales, and revenue growth. He blogs about digital transformation and marketing on MarketerSearch. His twitter is (@ShahidAbbasy)[https://twitter.com/@ShahidAbbasy].
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