Data Management System (DMS) with Business Analytics concept. businessman working with provide information for Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and marketing analysis onn virtual computer
It is already common practice to outsource development, accounting, customer service, and other areas of your business because it’s been found to save money/time on overhead, commitment, recruiting time, training time, and expenses that come with a full-time staff.
Outsourcing marketing has become increasingly popular and is expected to grow because of the same reasons. According to the a benchmark research study conducted earlier this year, a majority of B2B companies outsource 68% of their content development (writing and editorial) activities, 64% of their content asset design activities and 51% of their demand generation activities. They also outsource 27% of their content marketing strategy.
According to the findings, this trend is expected to continue throughout 2015 with a slight increase in demand generation (54% plan to outsource) as well as content marketing strategy (35% plan to outsource). All other content marketing-related functions over the next year are expected to remain about the same.
Benefits of Outsourcing Marketing
- Outsourcing your marketing efforts to an agency that can strategize and execute across multiple marketing channels frees up key players in your organization to focus on different ways to grow the company.
- Outsourcing provides digital experts who have likely worked with top-tier brands at a fraction of the cost of hiring them and without long-term commitment.
- You save on all of the time it takes to assemble a marketing team or if you’re a ‘DIY’ person – learning the entire Internet marketing field yourself.
- An outside perspective can provide an “objective viewpoint” which is difficult for any company’s executives to maintain.
Outsourcing your marketing team is a huge decision for any company, but when used the right way, it can be a positive and effective decision. The key component is to truly know and understand your company and its needs, so you make the right choice for the future growth of your company.
Should You Outsource?
If you are considering performing your marketing needs internally, ask yourself these questions, before putting a marketing department in place:
- Do you have the time each week to track industry trends?
- Do you have a good writer on staff to research and write articles?
- Who will set up and manage your social profiles?
- Who will monitor consumer posts and handle questions and complaints?
- Determine the writing skills of your designated person or persons. Do they have the skills required to write grammatically correct and interesting posts?
- Determine the technical skills of your designated person. Do they understand how the different social medial platforms work and can they link feeds from one site to another? Can they design pages that match your brand? Are they familiar with merging trends?
- Is it more cost effective to pay only for the services used for the length of time needed?
- Can you reduce company overhead costs related to office space, computers, vendor relationships and access to credit by outsourcing?
For all these reasons, outsourcing your marketing needs can deliver real value while at the same time deliver unmatched marketing results.