A common dilemma that many businesses will come across is how to manage certain areas within the company’s marketing plan. This could be the entire marketing strategy or perhaps just certain areas and website management for example. Solutions can be to appoint a person or team in house to do it, or to outsource the work to an agency, or even a bit of both. This is an important factor to consider, as you want to make the most out of your return on investment which means establishing what areas are best to outsource and which are best to keep in house.

All too often the marketing aspect of a business is the last thing that is considered due to lack of time and resource and in some cases budgets. Unfortunately, this is likely to be having a major impact on your business. A marketing strategy needs to be managed and maintained if you want to increase your leads and keep your brand up to date and visible for existing and potential audiences.

What Marketing Activities Can Be Outsourced?

There are a variety of levels to outsourcing work, whether it’s giving the whole marketing strategy to an agency to look after, or perhaps using an external source on a consultancy basis or training for your own team members just to make sure you’re on the right track and to keep your business abreast of new trends. You could look into just outsourcing one particular area such as content creation for example. It is very uncommon in today’s busy climate that a company will not outsource any work at all. Although there can be advantages in terms of cost, (if you have all of the necessary skills in house already) however, the disadvantages are far greater.

The first step is to decide what can be outsourced. Typical work that is outsourced tends to be the work that is most time consuming such as writing and managing web content,  social media updates, managing PPC campaigns and technical SEO.  You should be realistic about the skill set that you have in house, for example web design and development is a specialist area which requires extensive knowledge, and also be realistic about the time that you have – can you really manage a marketing strategy on top of your current daily work load?

5 Benefits of Using an Agency to Outsource Marketing Work

  1. Time: There are huge benefits to choosing marketing experts to help support your strategies. The obvious benefit here is time, we fully understand that a marketing role can be hugely varied and you may be pulled from here to there and tasked with several different jobs each day. Therefore the prospect of researching, writing, editing and then uploading a new blog post each week or more, probably isn’t going to happen!
  2. Up to date knowledge: Another reason that many businesses of all sizes choose to use a specialised agency is because an agency will always be aware of current and upcoming marketing trends. When the next Penguin or Panda update is approaching an expert marketing agency will know what to do and how to prepare.
  3. Access to valuable skills: Furthermore, there may be areas that require specialist design or development skills such as creating infographics and video content as part of your campaign. A marketing agency is highly likely to have all of these services in house and therefore can work together to produce these items on an ad-hoc basis which ultimately reduces the costs for you.
  4. Cost efficiency: Your agency will spend your budget in the most efficient way possible whilst summarising the important parts for you in a report that is easy to understand for all members of the business, overall saving you valuable time and resource. Although the costs may be higher initially, the overall long-term plan will save your budget considerably.
  5. Peace of mind: You know that when you appoint an expert marketing agency to look after your marketing campaigns, it will be carried out on time and to the best that it can be. You won’t need to worry about deadlines and new ideas for content as your agency can take of it all for you, letting you get on with your day to day activities.

In-house Vs Agency

You don’t necessarily need to outsource all of your marketing activities, you may have people within your business who are more than capable of managing this. They may however need a little assistance, this is where you can use an agency on a consultancy basis. The job of a marketing manager is vast and as such one or two people could do with a little help now and again, or just some reassurance that what they’re doing is right. At Rooster we allow our clients to use us for as much or as little as they need, this can either be on an ad-hoc basis or on a retained basis.

Another alternative is to offer training programmes to your team members so as they can maintain the marketing in-house. These training programmes are at a cost and often provided by marketing experts. This allows companies to retain management over campaigns themselves and can be cost effective in the short term. However, as with any training – especially in the world of marketing – things can change frequently, and quickly therefore training can be become quite quickly out of date which is worth considering with this option as you could be spending a lot of budget on out of date information.

To Summarise

Of course, every business is different and each will have unique marketing requirements and therefore there is not a ‘one size fits all’ answer. It is important however to assess how much time, resource and money is currently being put into your marketing activities and ask yourself, is the return greater? If not then it’s time to look at how this can be achieved.

Get in touch with us today at Rooster and see how we can help you.