How Outsourcing Can Improve Your Marketing Team’s Output And Business's Bottom Line

Digital marketing has transformed the way organizations of all sizes market forever. It has also made it more time-consuming, complex and labor intensive than ever before. In fact, the average marketer spends almost 40% of their time completing repetitive marketing tasks. While these tasks are important to deliver digital marketing success - they can often shift focus away from more strategic, value add activities.  

As a result, marketing departments are feeling increasingly under pressure. With under-resourced teams, this crucial business function is increasingly struggling to effectively scale their activity and effectively demonstrate sound return on investment. 

Outsourcing marketing functions presents a credible opportunity to increase this department’s volume of meaningful activity without adding considerable employment cost.

What Is Outsourcing And How Does It Relate To Your Marketing Services?

Outsourcing is a fee for service contracting arrangement. Organizations identify areas of opportunity where they may be looking to lower employment costs or increase their onshore staff's efficiency and capability levels. After identifying the marketing functions that prevent team members from achieving these goals, they would then engage a third-party provider to take over these marketing tasks. The result? Those businesses' onshore marketing team members will have more time to focus on developing marketing strategies to scale their business, thus improving efficiency and capability levels. 

What Marketing Services Or Roles Can Be Outsourced?

You can outsource as many roles, tasks or services as your business requires. Some organizations have almost their entire marketing team offshore, however in this type of scenario they generally keep strategic roles onshore. Others have one or two functions; it is all dependent on your organizational needs. 

To find out what roles can be outsourced, you can begin identifying tasks within your marketing team that are time-consuming and technical. 

There are several standard marketing services and roles that can be outsourced due to the fact that they are online in nature (rely heavily on digital technologies to perform a large majority of their job) and can be briefed by your onshore team as tasks via cloud-based sharing systems. These roles include, but are not limited to the following:

• Copywriters and content writers: offshore staff can support by creating things like social media copy, blog articles, newsletter content and so - based on what your business needs. 

• Digital marketing specialists: an offshore team might manage social media posting and monitoring, implement newsletter and email marketing campaigns, and manage complex marketing automation programs.

• Graphic, video and web designers: these staff members can edit videos, create animations, design creative for digital and print, and manage your organisation’s overarching brand guidelines. 

• SEO or SEM specialists: offshore staff can assist with all SEO and SEM implementation projects - whether it be keyword research to optimise your website content or running Adwords campaigns for your business. 

• Social media specialists: an offshore team member can support in implementing all social media campaigns, conduct social listening, monitor all engagement and optimise activity based on performance. 

Who And Where Can You Outsource Marketing Services To?

Now that remote working represents a ‘new kind of normal’ you could outsource your relevant marketing functions to a third-party provider down the road or on the other side of the world. What makes outsourcing so great is the introduction of digitization and online work collaboration platforms that make working with an offshore team seamless; you feel they are right there next to you. 

Who you decide to outsource your marketing services to is just as important as where. How can you trust that you have chosen the right third-party provider to meet your marketing needs? How do they operate and how do they monitor KPIs and performance metrics? 

While in discussion with outsourcing providers, it's crucial to speak to a few and compare their answers to these questions to feel confident that you have chosen the right supplier for your marketing team; what works for one business may not always work for another. 

What Are The Benefits Of Outsourcing Marketing Services And How Can You Know If This Is Right For Your Business?

The benefits are simple; by handing over the tasks taking up the majority of your onshore team's time to someone else, often at a fraction of the cost, your business can reassess what matters and ultimately improve upon your marketing team's capabilities and efficiencies. Think more time to scale and grow your business by focusing on marketing strategies and getting the support needed to achieve this from your offshore team. 

Additional benefits include:

• Time savings: Creating quality content takes time. When planning to meet lead goals and establish target audiences, the amount of content a business would like to create is met with time constraints and lack of funding. Enter outsourcing. Outsourced marketing teams can take care of this for you.
• Access to more specialists: Outsourcing allows you to broaden your market reach to no longer just include the local talent available. You get access to global expertise and skills that you may not have had access to in the past.
• Overheads reduced: No longer do you have to accommodate for HR costs like annual leave, work-cover and super, not to mention overheads associated with an extra desk; outsourcing takes care of this for you. Many outsourcing providers have state-of-the-art facilities for your outsource team to use while under your care. You no longer need to worry about renting larger spaces to accommodate team growth.

By answering the following questions, you can quickly identify if outsourcing could work for your marketing services:

Analyze your marketing team and breakdown their tasks. Are they: 

• Repetitive in nature
• Completed online or could be digitized to be done online
• Time-consuming and de-motivating to employees
• Require specialist skills that are attributed to high-cost salaries
• Not digital, but consist of administrative components, like data entry?

Do you have:

• Access to cloud-based information sharing systems,
• Training templates for new employees to learn methods and processes, or could you create some?

If you answered yes to any of these, then you should consider speaking to an outsourcing provider to get started. 

What's Next?

To help your business get started on your marketing team's outsourcing journey, consider downloading these two guides for more information on the process, step-by-step; part 1 and part 2. 

Charles Allnut is the Executive VP of Global Solutions for MicroSourcing, who plays a pivotal role in creating strategic partnerships to drive business efficiency and capabilities within their clients and their marketing services. Having been the Executive VP of Global Solutions for MicroSourcing for seven years, Charles represents MicroSourcing's commitment to making the whole outsourcing process easy and affordable for businesses wanting to establish dedicated teams within their operations base; The Philippines. MicroSourcing has over 280 global clients, with their 4,300 staff currently working across six offices of their offices in Manila managed by an operations team of 200.