When Should You Outsource Your Digital Marketing?

Get more done in less time without the expense of hiring more employees. Outsourcing digital marketing saves time, money and resources. When is it time?

3 min read

When Should You Outsource Your Digital Marketing?

For the past couple years, I’ve worked with many different companies on their marketing. Each one has had a slightly different organizational structure, but I have noticed one common thread throughout each of these engagements: they are always more successful if there is a marketing person inside.

In-house marketing teams are fantastic, and I’m a huge fan of them. They know the company inside and out, they interact with almost every department, and they have deep insight into the industry. Whether they have the word “marketing” in their title or simply serve as the marketing contact, I think it’s essential to have someone responsible for marketing inside your company.

That being said, there comes a point when it’s just too much for in-house marketers to handle. There is a wealth of valuable digital marketing tactics every company should take advantage of, but it’s impossible for small marketing teams to take on everything and still make it work.

Outsourcing your marketing to an agency opens up new possibilities you wouldn’t otherwise be able to manage. It allows you to get more done in less time without the expense of hiring more full-time marketers.

Signs You Should Outsource Your Marketing

Your marketing team is overworked

Digital marketing today has a lot of moving pieces, and it can be a challenge for a small team to juggle them all. Do you have too many initiatives for your in-house marketers to manage? Is the team stressed out, with one or a couple people scrambling to accomplish the work of many? Are projects and campaigns always behind schedule? If the answer to any one of those questions is yes, it’s a clear sign that you need to outsource part of your marketing.

Unloading some of that burden onto an agency will de-stress your team, making it easier for them to focus on their real job of growing the business rather than the day-to-day tasks that get in the way.

You’re planning for growth

Entering a high-growth phase will require a boost in your marketing, especially if the goal is to acquire many new customers. It makes sense—to get more customers you need to increase leads, and to do that you need to reach more people, which requires a more aggressive marketing push.

If you’re ramping up your marketing, you should definitely consider outsourcing. With an agency’s support, you can execute your plans faster and more efficiently, which will maximize your ROI and contribute to your growth goals.

You’re focused on tasks over strategy

In order for marketing to be effective, there has to be a purpose and a plan. If the team is stuck dealing with day-to-day tasks and not relating them back to an overall marketing strategy, that’s a problem.

When you outsource part of your digital marketing, you create space to think about the big picture. It stops being about simply getting stuff done and becomes about getting the right stuff done—the stuff that’s going to have a real business impact.

Your staff doesn’t have all the skills

If there are marketing initiatives you know your company needs, but you don’t have the right skills in-house, it’s an obvious time that it’s time to outsource. When you choose to outsource these more involved tasks, you get access to a group of people with specialized skills your team doesn’t have.

Whether you work with a marketing agency or freelancers, outsource the more technical aspects of digital marketing to the experts in order to see the highest return.

Top 3 Digital Marketing Initiatives You Should Outsource

SEO

Search engine optimization is complicated stuff, and doing it right takes quite a bit of time. Even if you have a person inside with some SEO chops, you will be more productive—and achieve better results—if you outsource to an expert.

Visual Content Creation

It’s always a plus when marketing people have Photoshop or InDesign experience. But in order to create the highest quality visual content for your brand, you should rely on a real graphic designer. Outsourcing digital content creation is a huge timesaver that helps your company maintain a high quality, consistent brand identity.

PPC /Paid Social Media Advertising

This is another area that’s very difficult to get right unless you really know what you’re doing. Pay-Per-Click campaigns and paid social advertising campaigns are great candidates to be managed for you by an outside source. They require significant research, monitoring and tweaking, and it can be easy to lose money if you’re not sure what you’re doing.

Overall, outsourcing digital marketing efforts saves time, money, and internal resources. Even if you have an in-house marketing team, consider passing the more time-consuming and technical tasks to an agency or freelancer and let your staff focus on their real job—growing your business.

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