7 Big Reasons to Outsource Your Marketing
Your receptionist isn’t a marketing expert (and neither are you)
Are you handing off social media management to an inexpert team member? Or wasting time trying to manage ad-hoc social media updates yourself? Or worse, maybe you’re neglecting social media marketing altogether?
Business owners and leaders often have the inclination to do everything themselves. But you don’t have to–and shouldn’t–do it alone. Here are seven great reasons why outsourcing your marketing will help you to reach more customers, saving you time and money in the process.
1. You don’t need to (and can’t) wear all the hats
I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise, but owning a small business doesn’t automatically make you a marketing expert. While tackling new and unfamiliar tasks might feel intriguing, they’ll also take you five times longer than someone who really knows what they’re doing. Chances are, your administrative assistant isn’t a marketing expert either.
Working on projects outside of your skill set can reduce your business’ overall productivity. Savvy leadership and good business sense is knowing when to hire people to do the jobs they’re good at. Sending staff members down dark, unfamiliar alleys costs time and money– and reduces the quality of the work.
While your otherwise awesome assistant spends three days carefully crafting a blog post, what’s likely to happen to their regular job duties? Tasks will be delayed, calls will go unanswered, and clients will feel neglected. Marketing copywriters and ghost blogging experts can get that article written much faster, leaving you and your team to focus on their regular, productive duties.
2. Trying to keep up with ever-changing trends isn’t realistic
Unless you spend all day reading sales blogs, trying out new social media platforms, and interpreting Google’s labyrinthine Page Rank system, you’re behind on the latest marketing best practices. Even if you did your research and put a great strategy in place a year ago, we can almost guarantee it’s now out of date and won’t be nearly as effective as it once may have been.
It’s not just that an outdated strategy is less effective; a stale campaign can possibly even drive customers away.
Luckily, those of us who specialize in marketing are dedicated to keeping up with the evolving trends. A well trained and professional marketing team can audit your current marketing strategy to let you know what’s not smelling so fresh – and then let you know what to do to spruce it up and make it effective.
3. Professional marketers are the best kind of nerds
You can write a Facebook post, but do you know how to gauge its effectiveness? How does it compare to your other Facebook posts? What about that thing you shared on Twitter last week? Is your Instagram feed reaching the right demographic? And which (if any) of these tools are turning casual readers into paying customers?
Effectively collecting, comparing, and calculating marketing analytics makes the difference between a potent marketing strategy and a load of wasted time and money. It takes specialized knowledge to structure your processes in a way that the data can be collected effectively, usefully analyzed, and continuously crafted and edited to consistently improve your marketing strategy and achieve the best return on investment.
When managed correctly, the wonderful world of nerdy analytics is the very best way to calculate your ROI and squeeze more out of every marketing dollar – effectively turning those Facebook posts into clients.
4. A marketing team has more marketing experience than you do
That’s a shocker, right? When you’re an entrepreneur, your focus is on YOUR business. You know it well. What you don’t know is what’s worked (and what hasn’t) for hundreds of other businesses.
A qualified marketing team brings a huge wealth of experience to the table. They draw on their involvement in a diversified portfolio of projects to create a strategy tailored specifically to your niche and specific business model. Professionals can implement your ideas in the most effective ways possible, and have insight into options you haven’t considered or even heard of yet.
5. Professional marketers have tried, tested, and true processes
Marketing companies are in the enviable position of knowing what tools and processes are the most effective. Are you able to weigh the benefits of Platform A vs. nearly-identical-but-not-quite-the-same Platform B? Not only do professional marketers know how to choose the right tools, but they know how to use them, too. They have experience with all of the latest tools and they invest in the platforms that fit best into their business methodology as part of their operating expenses.
When you try to run your marketing in-house, you’ll likely end up trying to recreate the wheel. No kidding, the learning curve is steep when investigating current marketing strategies, deciding whether to complement or replace existing practices, figuring out how to identify the right kind of influencers, learning where and how to target the right kinds of customers, and learning enough about all the different platforms to know which will best reach those customers. Professional marketers have the knowledge and skills to hit the ground running.
The learning doesn’t stop at the planning stages. In marketing, you have to stay on top of and evolve with the latest trends and know how to streamline your marketing processes to operate in the most efficient and cost-effective ways possible. Is this really how you want to invest your time and money? Why develop processes and train people to follow those processes efficiently when you can outsource to a marketing team who already comes equipped with the skills and processes?
6. Strategic planning is hard and takes time
Marketing isn’t a “fly by the seat of your pants” endeavour. Without a plan, you’re most likely wasting your social capital without any tangible return. But developing a comprehensive strategy is hard work and requires a significant investment in both big picture thinking and translating that big picture into a multitude of details.
As a business owner, you’re already developing and maintaining the strategy for your overall business plan. Keeping up with all the minutia of marketing is yet another heavy hat – but it’s one you don’t have to wear. Outsourcing this strategy enlists the help of experts that will not only help you develop an effective plan but will remove the burden of implementing it.
7. Outsourcing is cheaper. Full stop.
You may have noticed a trend so far: marketing takes time, planning, and specialized skills. Hiring one or (more likely) multiple employees requires a huge investment, and therefore a huge risk to your budget. Not only is outsourcing more efficient, it’s straight-up cheaper.
It’s easy to succumb to the desire to DIY everything – that sleeves rolled up, entrepreneurial spirit is likely what brought you into business in the first place! But the bottom line is still the bottom line, and we’re all interested in saving money, particularly when those savings translate into better results.
When you hire professionals, you get access to experts who are dedicated to helping you build your business. They’ll streamline a job that (no offence) you may not be particularly qualified for. Or worse, they’ll save you from wasting your employees’ time as they attempt to do work they haven’t been trained for and likely don’t understand or enjoy.
An outsourced team will be up-to-date on the latest digital trends and best practices. They’ll be able to evaluate and constantly optimize your marketing efforts to reach your ideal customers. They come with a diverse range of experience and a fresh perspective on your business. They have the latest software, technology, and the skills to use them. Marketing experts will use all of this to develop and manage a highly effective overall strategy.
Marketing by Marketers
Outsourcing your marketing is all-around the smart choice for your bottom line. Why not take us up on the offer of a free consultation? We’ll take a look at your existing marketing plan and make suggestions of how you can push your business to the next level.
