“In your business, do what you love and outsource the rest. Remember you’re the boss” – First Step Virtual Assistant
We know that today, marketing is an inextricable part of service to customers. Marketing efforts cannot survive in isolation and must reflect the efforts of a company to look at things from the customer’s perspective. However, given that marketing is a time-consuming activity and companies today have their hands full with keeping customers happy, running their businesses, outdoing competitors, and constantly developing products and services. With so much going on outsourcing marketing efforts seems like an attractive proposition, but most companies want to keep control and do not look at outsourcing. For those stuck between these opposing needs, making the decision of whether they should look at outsourcing marketing efforts or not becomes a herculean task.
In the interest of a healthy and constructive discussion, let us look at the reasons for and against outsourcing marketing efforts. The underlying premise is that companies can benefit, and at the same time ensure that their customers benefit too. Let us first analyse the reasons for looking at outsourcing this critical to success activity. As mentioned, time today seems more limited than ever, for all and hence becomes one of the most forceful reasons for a company to look at outsourcing marketing efforts. Creating, distributing, and analysing top class marketing content in the form of words, graphics, colours, and videos takes up a great deal of time and effort. Additionally, a company would need to keep in constant touch with and would need to interact with the readers of the blogs and ‘followers’ on social media, which is again a time consuming activity. If a company lacks in-house capability to make these actions a success, outsourcing marketing efforts could prove to be a viable and resourceful solution – it would free up the human resource to focus on high-priority activities.
Today there are several professional marketing firms and agencies with dedicated teams of experts specializing in all facets of marketing, including top class content, branding, promotion, and distribution. These professionals would be well placed to develop and put into action, marketing campaigns with expertise, such that the campaigns would translate to better results and high ROI. In this then, outsourcing marketing efforts would make business sense. Studies show that when a company used a professional marketing agency for its marketing efforts, the company was able to double its revenue in four months, the company witnessed a 12-fold increase of revenue per email, and the average CLV rose by about twenty-nine percentage. The other advantage of using a professional marketing firm is focus and concentration on the work at hand. As professionals, they would know which strategy and tools to deploy such that the ROI for the company is optimum. If a company does not have the in-house capacity and still endeavours to put together marketing tactics, the efforts would largely fall flat. Since the agency would be directly responsible for the results, they would remain focused and would keep the company focused on achieving the desired goals. The expertise of such agencies allows a company to look at outsourcing marketing efforts with peace of mind.
Outsourcing marketing efforts to a professional agency brings the element of objectivity. From a company’s standpoint, it would be overly focused on creating hype and would be from the perspective of making a sale, and doing so could compromise on the effectiveness of advertisements or even content – what might sound great for the company may not necessarily be so for the target audience. Outsourcing marketing efforts on the other hand, ensures that the marketing agency would use analytical tools and proper methods to ensure that the campaigns are designed from the customer’s perspective, which would prove a lot more effective.
Given the reasons for outsourcing marketing efforts, if a company does decide to use an agency, it must consider whether it would want to outsource all activities or a few. The broad range of activities in marketing would be search engine optimization, content creation, graphic design, video production, social media management, email marketing, TV advertising, radio advertising, print ads, direct mail, telemarketing, public events, and others. A company would know which of the techniques it would like to use and the agency would be in a better position to identify which options would fit best for the company and the offerings. In addition to understanding which activities to outsource, a company must find the best and ideal marketing agency to handle its marketing efforts. It would be prudent to shortlist a few agencies, check their previous assignments, ask them relevant questions around their specialities and strengths, and the kind of vision and values they would bring. Remember to check references, online reviews, and make a comparison of their price quotation before finalizing any one particular agency. A sound work contract would be necessary too.
A company can use any of the several online resources and marketing agency directories to find the most reputed and established agencies to handle their outsourcing marketing efforts. It is necessary for a company to have KPIs and a fixed budget for the particular marketing project, and ensure that the marketing agency will keep the company updated of progress, glitches, and other relevant information.
On the other side, there are reasons why companies should not look at outsourcing marketing efforts at all. The fact that hiring a professional marketing agency will be costly is certainly a deterrent, and is one of the main reasons that companies hesitate and are reluctant to work with a marketing agency. It would be prudent for a company to weigh the actual cost of outsourcing marketing efforts to an agency with the potential benefits of doing so. If the company has in-house marketing teams and they could handle the project, it would be wiser to use these resources instead. If the in-house team seems unable and ill equipped to handle the magnitude of work and effort needed, then outsourcing marketing efforts would make sense.
The loss of creative control when hiring an external agency is yet another reason that goes against outsourcing marketing efforts. For companies that need a higher level of security and confidentiality, outsourcing anything would never be a good idea. Since the marketing agency would have the creative leeway, the company would need to concede some of autonomy and discretion to the company – meaning some loss of control. If a company has a problem with or would feel unconfident about providing information to a third party, it should just manage the marketing efforts in-house. Additionally, the company may not be able to find the right firm or the firm it hires may not meet its expectations, and the reasons could be many, then outsourcing marketing efforts would be a complete waste. In addition, since an agency would only be working for the money, it would not be as passionate about the business as the company would be. For the agency, a company would be one of many clients, who would need their expertise – professionalism and passion would therefore be missing for any one particular client.
Outsourcing marketing efforts to an outside agency should be thought out well and must be planned meticulously. It is a risk, but if a company prepares a robust plan, it would be a risk worth taking. We do recommend looking at all the reasons – both for and against outsourcing marketing efforts, and only take a step after carefully analysing every aspect.
