Why outsource your digital marketing?
This is a common business dilemma. The right decision at the right time is critical if you want your brand to be successful. Online marketing isn’t a matter of choice anymore; it is essential.
The number of digital marketing channels has increased exponentially and it is almost impossible for brands to do business without a robust digital marketing strategy that requires resources and expertise.
If you are on the fence and unable to decide if outsourcing is the right thing to do, the following reasons to outsource digital marketing will help you make an informed decision.
5 Reasons to Outsource Digital Marketing
1. Expertise
This is perhaps the top reason why you must outsource digital marketing. You get access to exclusive expertise and experience that’s hard to find elsewhere.
Most small businesses prefer outsourcing to get help from an expert, studies show. Around 26 percent of small businesses having 1-10 employees use outsourcing to get help from an expert:
Businesses with 251-500 employees also use outsourcing to get access to expert opinions and services. A digital marketing agency that has worked with a multitude of brands knows a lot about marketing and will know several techniques and tactics that your marketing team might not know.
This isn’t just limited to techniques — they also have the resources and tools to put your brand on track almost immediately. Think of templates, access databases and tools, and connections that your marketing team might not have. What your digital marketing team will do in a year, a digital marketing agency might do in a week because it won’t start from step one.
First Page Strategy, for example, has a ready-to-use template for building buyer personas and mapping a buyer’s journey for tech and SaaS companies. We developed these and several other templates, workflows, and action plans that your team might need months to create.
Digital marketing outsourcing gives you instant access to resources from experts and you can utilize their expertise for business growth.
2. Cost Reduction
“What drives the clients’ decisions [for outsourcing] is cost reduction. If there is no positive cost case, it [outsourcing] will not happen. It is always about cost.” That's according to the 2020 Global Outsourcing Survey by Deloitte, which shows that 70 percent of businesses use outsourcing for cost reduction — and if they can’t reduce cost, they don’t opt to outsource:
When you outsource digital marketing, your brand saves a lot of different expenses, including hiring costs, training costs, equipment and infrastructure costs, technology costs, and administrative costs.
For example, if you want to run a podcast, you'll need to hire or train employees, buy equipment, invest in tools and apps, and create the right infrastructure. On the other hand, outsourcing podcast production means you need to spend a fixed monthly amount and the rest is handled by the production company.
The same goes for any other form of digital marketing.
The best thing about outsourcing is that you don’t have to spend money on hiring and training, especially if you are testing a new marketing technique. Digital marketing requires experimentation. It is hard to achieve sustainable growth without experimentation. When you have multiple marketing experiments going on, hiring and training a new workforce becomes too expensive and hectic.
3. Improved Efficiency
Scarcity is a key issue for businesses. Resources aren’t unlimited and you have to manage resources smartly. Time is one of the most crucial resources for any brand. Utilizing time and allocating it smartly improves efficiency.
As much as 88 percent of businesses invest in outsourcing to improve standardization and efficiency:
Outsourcing digital marketing means you don’t have to manage everything in house and there is one less thing to worry about. Importantly, your brand’s digital marketing is right on track from day one with outsourcing. The process is standardized with detailed reporting and analysis.
This makes more sense when you have a limited workforce and you have to choose and prioritize among different tasks. This is a reason why 27 percent of small businesses outsource to increase efficiency and save time:
Outsourcing to improve efficiency isn’t just limited to small brands. Large businesses and enterprises face this issue on a much larger scale. Large brands run multiple marketing campaigns simultaneously and these businesses have to manage time wisely to improve efficiency. Outsourcing one or more campaigns (when internal teams are fully occupied) is the best way to maintain efficiency and process standardization.
4. Flexibility
Outsourcing digital marketing makes your brand flexible. You can change marketing channels, add new campaigns, target a new market, experiment easily, and make your marketing proactive (instead of reactive).
Imagine you are doing marketing in-house and you decide to run PPC ads to strengthen your brand’s inbound marketing efforts. You realize that no one in your team knows how to do PPC. And the only option is to go with a new hire. It takes, on average, more than 42 days to fill a position with an average hiring cost of $4,129. Running a PPC campaign for a quarter yields no results and you decide to try TikTok marketing. You'll now look for a TikTok marketer.
And so on.
Enter outsourcing.
The moment you decide to run a PPC campaign, you'll have everything set up via an expert agency in a few days. The moment you want to stop the PPC campaign and switch to TikTok marketing, you can do it the same day without having to go through hiring, training, and transferring the recruit.
The digital marketing industry goes through a lot on a daily basis. Marketing channels that nobody is using today might become essential the next day. You must have the flexibility and adaptability to continuously adapt and this only comes with outsourcing.
5. Access to Martech
You can’t do digital marketing effectively without tools and apps. There were around 8,000 martech solutions available in 2020 and the number has increased exponentially since then.
There is now a tool for everything for digital marketing such as advertising, keyword research, SEO, content management, content creation, data analytics, project management, and more. These platforms come at a cost, need maintenance and staff training, and involve complexities.
Digital marketing agencies have access to most of these solutions and this is one solid reason why you should consider outsourcing digital marketing. It isn’t just about the tool; how you use it is more important. Agencies don’t just provide you access to top martech solutions — they have mastered these solutions and the know-how to use them to their full capacity.
Time to Outsource Your Digital Marketing
With all these reasons and benefits, there isn’t any second opinion on why outsource your digital marketing. The question is: What should you look for in a digital marketing agency?
The consulting company or agency must have a proven track record, certification or affiliation, access to tools and resources, and a solid plan of action. The agency must know how to do it instead of what to do. And this is what exactly we do at First Page Strategy. We give our clients a plan of action that addresses how we will help them achieve results.
Get in touch today to enjoy the benefits of outsourcing.
