Learn The Benefits of Outsourcing Your Marketing
Before we jump into the benefits of outsourcing your marketing, let us first discuss the problems of outsourcing your marketing.
You may have managed the marketing and growth of your start-up initially, and by then many agencies would have approached you, which you might have hated because someone outside of the organisation would be doing the marketing.
You also must have faced many problems with consultancies and agencies, such as:
- They always seem to focus on the wrong metrics like impressions, clicks, or traffic when all you care about is lead generation, sales, or revenue growth.
- They only added a portion of a full-time employee, whereas you could get a lot more time out of someone you hired to work internally.
- Lastly, they could never be immersed in your business as much as an employee who sits in your office and understands your culture, product, problems, and strengths.
Now we come to 3 significant benefits of outsourcing your marketing that they had not necessarily considered before working at a consultancy.
For starters, industries have changed a lot since that time. Our understanding of the value that agencies or consultancies can bring has changed.
We think marketers and agencies have come a long way since then, so they’re no longer chasing vanity metrics. They understand the challenges and the goals of the businesses they work with and deliver work that aims to meet those goals. Well, the good ones do anyway.
We have come to realise since then that most businesses don’t need a team of full-time employees. A successful digital marketing strategy needs to span across multiple channels, but you don’t have to put the same time budget and resources into each one. If you hired a specialist for each channel, then some would probably spend a lot of time twiddling their thumbs and get very bored and unmotivated.
Your turnover is to hire people who manage multiple channels, but they end up not being as effective because they are not specialists. When it comes to being immersed in business, there’s no denying that an employee can do this far better than an agency or consultancy. But, you probably don’t need them to become quite so involved to be successful. Being so focused on one business can work against you because your employees have a little context for what constitutes good marketing or good results. It also helped a lot to see strategies for other businesses and even other industries that could be applied internally after a few tweaks and adjustments.
1. More Upskill
The first is that people, consultancies, and agencies are constantly developing and evolving their marketing skills. Most marketers will say that they stay up-to-date by reading industry blogs, watching videos, and downloading resources. A few will do as much as someone in an agency or consultancy being surrounded by other marketers day-in and day-out. It also means that you have the opportunity to learn from others first-hand while they work on other campaigns. Plus, we have internal slack channels for the best articles, videos, and case studies that are not only shared but discussed, so there’s a deeper understanding of each topic.
It is said that companies have stressed how valuable it has been for them to have other experienced marketers around when they are trying a new strategy or tactic. Even so, we are able to ask the team if they have faced any similar experiences with clients and then adapt their learning to make sure that the company’s campaign and experiments were a success.
If you are someone who was previously in the marketing team and that option wasn’t available, you could have asked for colleagues or manager’s opinions, but without the experience to back those opinions up, they were just the best guess.
The internet is full of people sharing their experiences, but they can’t all be trusted. There’s no substitute for discussing those experiences face-to-face rather than reading them off a screen. As well as learning from other people, there’s the experience that comes from working on other clients. For example, working on bigger clients can help ensure that you set up smaller client campaigns to scale effectively. On the other hand, smaller clients can force you to learn hacks and shortcuts that can be applied to bigger clients.
Then there’s the benefit of applying strategies and tactics multiple times across clients, giving you the opportunity to learn each time and understand the strategy or tactic much better.
Not only will these marketers overcome obstacles more effectively, but the good ones will also share what they learn with their clients to help them improve their marketing campaigns.
2. Access to tools and platforms
As well as access to experienced team members, marketing companies will have access to dozens of tools and platforms that most businesses work with. For example, a company reportedly spends more than $380,000 a year on various marketing tools, which they can use for any of their client campaigns. Unless you are a Fortune 500 company, $380,000 a year of mark technology is going to make a significant dent in your marketing budget. So you are likely to go without some of the tools that can really help.
Agencies and consultancies will have these tools at their disposal and they’ll have experience of how to use them, so they’ll have far more options on how they can improve and optimise their campaigns to take your results to the next level.
As well as access to tools, marketing companies enjoy close relationships with the likes of Google, Facebook, Hubspot, Spotify, publishers and many other marketing brands. This means that the company is able to leverage their time and expertise into the company’s client campaigns to make them even more successful. Companies are also invited to exclusive events to learn more and have access to tools and functions that are yet to be released, so you can get a head start on your competition.
Most businesses won’t be spending enough with marketing giants in this order to have such a close relationship. But working with an agency or consultancy can indirectly give you this access, particularly if you’re their partner.
3. Not having to hire
The last major benefit is not having to worry about hiring the right team. On a recent call with a client who spent months trying to find the right people for their marketing before deciding to talk to us instead, they told us that all the good mid-level marketers were already snapped up and not looking for jobs. Because of the high demand for marketers, more junior marketers with little experience demanded higher pay.
Then, once you have found a good person, you have to invest a lot in order to make sure you keep them. Most businesses can’t offer the development opportunities, perks and benefits or the culture that marketing agencies or consultancies can. Which means that’s where a lot of the best talents end up.
The client we spoke about is happy and they found the right people as they ended up working with a team of specialists.
Conclusion
We’re not only great at executing the marketing strategy that we created together, but it’s enabled the remainder of their team to focus on aspects that an outsourced team can’t. They look to find improvements internally and have become more product market managers who can rely on us to support them and enhance their marketing wherever possible. To be clear, it shouldn’t be a case of hiring internally or working with an agency. We think that the strongest approach is to have a combination of both. And outsourcing your marketing is for everyone. You need to make sure that you find an agency or consultancy that has a similar approach to you. But if you can find a team like that, then you can drive some significant results from your marketing together.
We are keen to hear what you think, particularly if you have experience of working at both. What approach do you see as working better: exclusively hiring in-house or working with an agency?
