To Outsource, or Not to Outsource, That is the Question.
There’s no denying that a robust online marketing strategy is pivotal to the success of any business. However, crafting and consistently managing your digital marketing across a constantly evolving array of platforms can be both time-consuming and challenging.
One of the foremost benefits of outsourcing digital marketing is the access it provides to a highly skilled team, well-versed in the latest Martech and AI innovations. Such depth of expertise is something a generalist marketer, working in isolation within a company, simply cannot match. In this guide, we will delve into this and other significant advantages of a strategic outsourcing approach, leveraging external expertise to achieve your marketing and business objectives.
What Does It Mean to Outsource Digital Marketing?
When a business owner, CEO, or CMO chooses to outsource digital marketing, they typically collaborate with an experienced digital marketing agency, such as Digital Willow, to help them achieve and sustain their online marketing goals. The agency’s role is to understand the business model, ambitions, and brand thoroughly to represent the business accurately in the digital realm.
Depending on the scope required, a company might opt to delegate specific marketing tasks or entire projects or campaigns to a skilled external agency, usually entering into a contract period of a minimum of 6 months.
Primarily, businesses outsource digital marketing services because it enables a dedicated team of experts to focus their efforts on delivering the best possible results, freeing up the business’s internal staff to concentrate on other critical areas.
Why Should You Outsource Digital Marketing? Reasons & Benefits
The digital marketing industry is fiercely competitive. The internet is a vastly saturated place with numerous players vying simultaneously for visibility and engagement, often targeting the same audience. In such a challenging environment, outsourcing your digital marketing can give you that crucial edge over your closest competitors.
Some of the many benefits of outsourcing digital marketing services include:
Cost-Effectiveness: Ideally, you would have a large internal marketing team with specialists across various fields, such as PPC, SEO, UX, and social content. However, for most businesses, this is an expensive dream unlikely to manifest. Building a specialist team in-house involves many hidden costs on top of salaries, such as recruitment, sick pay, holiday pay, insurance, desk space, and training. An agency, on the other hand, takes on these difficulties and can provide your business with the expertise needed in any given month, without the expense of a full-time employee.
Access to Expertise: A digital marketing agency brings together experts in various digital marketing fields, offering a wider range of knowledge than a single, internal hire. This allows you to access specialised skills and experience without the ongoing costs of full-time staff. For example, you might need an SEO expert three days a month and a programmatic media buyer five days a month.
Focus on Core Business: Running a successful business requires focusing on core competencies and strategic vision. Managing digital marketing tasks on top of everything else can spread you too thin. By outsourcing to an agency, you delegate the day-to-day operations of your online presence.
Scalability: Outsourcing to a digital marketing agency is an excellent way to scale into new markets or countries, reducing your upfront risk. It gives your business the chance to add headcount and expertise quickly and move into markets with experts that have the experience you can leverage in the marketing process.
Growth Targets in Sight: Agencies can be briefed on specific growth targets or goals. Unlike an internal team, if targets or goals are not reached, it is much easier to end the working relationship than it is to dismiss an employee. Furthermore, agencies specialise in understanding return on investment (ROI) for marketing campaigns. They’ll help you define what success looks like and hold themselves accountable for achieving those goals. This level of transparency and focus on results is often more challenging to establish with an internal team.
Access to Advanced Tools and Technologies: Digital marketing agencies invest in the latest tools and technologies to deliver the best results for their clients. By outsourcing, your business can benefit from these advanced resources without the significant investment required to purchase and learn them in-house. This includes tools for analytics, automation, and more, ensuring your campaigns are always at the cutting edge.
How to Outsource Your Online Marketing (Finding the Right Agency)
By now you should be convinced by the numerous benefits of outsourcing your digital marketing activities to a digital marketing agency. The next step, however, can be the most tricky; choosing the right agency to partner with. The biggest difference in your options is likely to be the size of the agency/consultancy you decide to hire, with advantages and disadvantages both big and small.
Electing to partner with a bigger agency means working with a bigger staff, housing specialist across all digital marketing disciplines including PPC, SEO, Copy Writing, Social Media, Automation, and Lead Generation (to name but a few!). Moreover, size of an agency is often testimony to their experience and success. These can also have a global reach as well as access to the best and latest Martech on account of their typically larger budgets.
A bigger agency also means a bigger price tag, however, and, depending on the size of your business, could prove unaffordable. Although it is unlikely, a bigger agency may mean being lower down on the priority list with staff being spread thin across their client base. This issue could present itself in slower response time or drawn-out processes and approval.
With this in mind, there are several reasons to consider a smaller digital marketing agency as an alternative to this. Not only are smaller agencies typically less expensive, you’ll likely have a dedicated team working closely with you, offering a more customised approach to your marketing needs. This heightened communication allows for quicker adaptation to e.g., changing market trends and any of your specific requirements as and when they arise. One downside to a smaller agency may be a limit in the resources available to them as smaller budgets and profit margins force them to be more selective with their Martech expenses.
At Digital Willow, we’re a fiercely independent force in the digital marketing industry and have been pushing boundaries at the cutting edge for the last 12 years. Backed with years of experience in the different digital marketing disciplines, it’s our close-held belief that the secret to good business is in the relationships between people. That’s why we have something we like to call the ‘Happiness Advantage‘. We combine a “can-do” attitude with a spirit of fun to tackle challenges with our partners. We believe that approaching problems with a positive mindset and strong collaboration unlocks the most creative solutions. Being able to do this requires a team spirit and attitude shared by all our staff, with each member of the Digital Willow team sharing a genuine desire to assist and an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Because of the boundless curiosity we share, we’re constantly testing and learning the latest technology, with a particular focus on AI. This constant experimentation helps keep us on our toes and allows us certain flexibility when we want to tailor our solutions to specific client needs. Collaboration and transparency, revealing itself in regular reporting, is in our DNA.
Digital Marketing Services to Outsource
At Digital Willow, our service expertise is as wide as it is deep, covering and mastering all areas of the digital marketing landscape. In fact, we like to think of them as our Superpowers.
They are as follows: Marketing Automation, Marketing Audit, PPC Management, Social Media Marketing, Lead Generation & Data Mining, Proximity Marketing, Retargeting, Content Strategy, Digital Display Marketing, Video Marketing, App Advertising, Ecommerce, Media Buying & Publisher Negotiations, Advertising Research, Conversion Tracking & Code Creation, Reviews & Reputation Marketing, Programmatic Advertising, Conversion Funnel, Marketing Campaign Management, Email Marketing, Insights, Analysis & Reporting, Media Planning, and Search Engine Optimisation SEO.
Digital Marketing You May Want to Keep In-House
Despite the countless benefits of outsourcing digital marketing services, as aforementioned, there are certain times, tasks, and business models where it may be more appropriate to keep aspects of your campaign reserved for your in-house marketing team.
Your brand is your brand. The vision you have for your business is what makes you unique and should be the driving force behind all your marketing strategy and decisions. An in-house team should innately understand your brand personality, values, and nuances, ensuring all content reflects that authenticity. Your in-house team is also likely to be closer to the customer base, understanding their needs, wants, and pain points. This allows them to tailor content that speaks directly to your audience and builds stronger, more meaningful connections. Market trends can change rapidly, and if you need to respond fast to changing audience preferences, keeping these decisions in-house can be the quickest way to get from idea to implementation with an efficient sign-off procedure. On the other hand, communicating with a third-party risks things getting lost in translation and can take way longer for a conceptual stage to reach final approval and launch.
Conversely, your team might lack some of the skills and/or technology to be able to implement changes, requiring you to outsource to a team that does and can. An outside agency can bring new ideas and approaches to your brand storytelling, challenging assumptions and sparking creativity.
Another area of operation you may consider remaining in-house would be your customer service interactions and social media marketing. This once again comes down to an understanding of your brand tone of voice and utilising a direct line to your known audience with efficiency and accuracy, with an in-house team likely to ensure consistency and positive responses that will resonate with your audience.
With a deep knowledge of the product(s) and/or service(s) you sell, their ability to address customer concerns will be heightened, allowing them to provide specific and helpful solutions to issues in real-time, all of which help build trust and confidence in your brand as a whole. The nature of social media means that customers expect quick responses. An in-house team can address inquiries and issues promptly, minimising frustration and improving customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, Social media can be a breeding ground for both positive and negative sentiment. An in-house team allows you to directly monitor and address any negative feedback, limiting potential damage to your brand reputation.
However, outsourcing customer service on social media can have its advantages too. After all, building and maintaining an in-house team can be expensive. Outsourcing can be a more cost-efficient option, especially for businesses with limited resources or less frequent social media interactions. Agencies may have dedicated social media customer service specialists with experience handling a wide range of situations and communication styles.
A final big factor to contemplate with regards to the possibility of outsourcing would be reporting, insights, and analysis. An in-house team with complete access to your data means you can track progress transparently and hold your team accountable for achieving objectives. You can also customise reports to focus on metrics most relevant to your business. Daily monitoring allows for ongoing communication within your marketing team. They can discuss insights, brainstorm solutions, and adapt strategies collaboratively, leading to a more cohesive approach.
Drawbacks of Keeping it In-House/Advantages of Outsourcing Digital Marketing Services
If you’re going to keep your brands’ digital marketing in-house, it is imperative that the members of your team assigned to this position have a spread of knowledge that helps level them to that of a larger, more specialised team. Keeping an in-house team more often than not equates to less manpower than that of a digital marketing agency, so you must be assured of their capability from the off. If not, you may find yourself in a situation in which you’ve neither the skill or experience to overcome a problem or to draw actionable insights from complex data sets. Not only do marketing agencies have the staff to guarantee maximum efficiency and dedication, but they also have access to advanced analytics tools and experienced professionals who can interpret data effectively, providing valuable insights you might otherwise miss.
Assigning the role of an internal marketing force will also either cost the wage packet of a new employee or take away from your client-focused sector, that is, if you want your digital marketing to be done properly; daily monitoring requires constant attention, which can take away from your team’s time otherwise dedicated to other marketing activities. Another problem to be weary of is an internal bias; an in-house team might be overly invested in the success of specific campaigns, leading to biased interpretations of data. An outside agency, on the other hand, brings objectivity and a fresh perspective to your data, identifying areas for improvement that your team might overlook. Outsourcing frees up your team’s time to focus on core marketing activities like campaign execution and content creation. Scalability is another big plus when outsourcing as agencies can adjust their services based on your needs, scaling up or down as your digital marketing efforts evolve.
The Best Approach
The best approach depends on your specific needs and resources. Considering the above, you’ll need to ask yourself these important questions before you make your decision:
- Team Expertise: Does your team have the necessary skills and experience for daily monitoring and analysis?
- Data Volume and Complexity: How much data are you generating? Is it complex enough to require specialised skills for interpretation?
- Budget: Can you afford the ongoing cost of outsourcing daily reporting?
- Time Constraints: Does your team have enough time dedicated to daily monitoring without sacrificing other tasks?
Ultimately, the decision depends on your resources, team expertise, and brand-specific needs. You can even consider a hybrid approach, outsourcing specific content tasks while keeping core storytelling in-house.
The Costs of Different Marketing Approaches
Outsourcing costs vary depending on the services required, agency experience, and project scope. Compare the costs of outsourcing with building an internal team to find the most cost-effective solution for your business.
If you decide to remain in-house for your digital marketing services, you will be paying at least one person’s salary to take on that role and responsibility. Even for one person, the money spent on wages is considerable, especially if you think of the limitations of just one person’s skill, experience, and knowledge. Not having a second point of view can also be limiting in the style and scope of your marketing campaign(s). Variation and being challenged and questioned on your decisions is what builds development and progress. This is one of the advantages of outsourcing to a team of digital marketers. Not only are you acquiring a dedicated and highly trained group of workers, they’re constantly working together to test and learn and find out which ideas are driving the best results. All of this is delivered at an equivalent price of one internal worker who (it is highly likely) will have to balance your company’s digital marketing services with various other duties.
This is assuming there is already a person in the company in or ready to fulfil that role. If you’re planning on hiring someone to take on this position, the cost of advertising open positions, interviewing candidates, and training new hires will also need to be factored in.
If you outsource to an agency like Digital Willow, the power to scale your efforts is in your hands. Controlling your investment allows you to scale your marketing efforts up or down as needed, all the while being flexible with your changing budget.
How To Measure Success with Outsourced Digital Marketing
At Digital Willow, the first port of call when starting a partnership with any client is to have a sit down and understand what their business is about, their passion, vision, and what they want to have achieved by the end of the process. Whether it’s increased brand awareness, website traffic, lead generation, sales, or something else entirely, the Digital Willow team can help them figure out these goals even if they’re a bit unsure to begin with.
Once we’ve identified and settled on objectives, we can begin to roadmap their way to achieving these. This is about making identifiable milestones and goals by which to monitor their progress i.e. key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, if their goal is brand awareness, we might aim for a specific increase in social media followers or website traffic.
Here are some common KPIs for different goals:
- Brand awareness: Website traffic, social media reach, impressions.
- Lead generation: Number of leads generated, cost per lead (CPL).
- Sales: Conversion rate, customer acquisition cost (CAC).
Track and Analyse Performance Regularly
- Utilise analytics tools: Most marketing platforms and agencies will provide reports with relevant metrics. Google Analytics is an example of a powerful tool we use for website traffic analysis.
- Schedule regular reviews: Meet with us to discuss campaign performance, analyse data, and identify areas for improvement.
- Look for trends and insights: We don’t just focus on individual data points, we see how metrics change over time and identify patterns that can help you optimise your campaigns.
Communication is Key
- Maintain open communication: We regularly discuss your goals and expectations to make sure both parties are happy with the direction of progress being made.
- Provide feedback: Let us know what’s working and what’s not.
- Ask questions: Don’t hesitate to ask for clarification on reports or data.
Look Beyond Numbers
- Customer satisfaction: While numbers are important, consider customer feedback and engagement.
- Brand perception: Are you achieving the desired brand image through your marketing efforts?
Here are some additional tips:
- Set realistic expectations: Building a successful marketing strategy takes time. Don’t expect overnight results. This is especially true of particular areas of optimisation e.g. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
- Focus on ROI (Return on Investment): Track the revenue generated from your marketing efforts to see if your investment is paying off.
- Benchmark your results: Compare your performance to industry averages or your own historical data to see if you’re on the right track.
By following these steps, you can effectively measure the success of your outsourced digital marketing and ensure you’re getting a good return on your investment.
FAQs
1. Should you outsource your digital marketing?
Whilst there is no right or wrong answer to this question, outsourcing digital marketing to a professional digital marketing agency often yields an impressive return on investment (ROI). The experience, dedication, and expertise of a trained marketing team help give you a competitive edge in whichever area your business wants to invest in most, whether it be SEO, PPC, Social Media Marketing, Content Creation etc.
2. What is social media marketing outsourcing?
When you outsource your social media marketing, you entrust the management of your various social media accounts into the hands of a digital marketing specialist or agency. This can include (but is not limited to):
Social Media Strategy: Helping to plan and schedule content over a period or time which is tailored towards specific goals such as brand awareness or customer engagement.
Creating Content: Writing appropriate, publishable content alongside engaging designs, videos, and images.
Regular Reporting: Requiring continuous performance tracking and analysis from which to provide insights and recommendations to benefit the business.
3. What is outsourcing in digital marketing?
When you outsource your digital marketing, you entrust a specialist company with the complete process of crafting, launching, and managing your ad campaigns.
4. Is it cheaper to outsource marketing?
It can often be more cost-efficient to outsource digital marketing campaigns to digital marketing experts. Leaving your digital marketing strategy in the hands of a marketing agency or marketing consultant can save money.
The benefit of industry expertise and professional content marketing across different social media platforms means they you can focus your energy on serving your customer base and driving profit.
5. Where can I get digital marketing outsourcing?
You can outsource your digital marketing to local or national/international agencies. Local agencies offer personalised service and deep local market knowledge, making them ideal for businesses targeting a specific geographic area. On the other hand, national and international agencies provide a wider range of services and expertise but often come with a higher price tag.
But we thought we would save you some time by saying…
Right here from the Digital Willow team! We hope this blog has instilled the confidence needed to make the all important decision of outsourcing your digital marketing services to a team of experts. Contact us today for a free consultation.