Whether you are a business owner, hold a high-ranking position in management within an organisation or are simply enquiring as to whether it is worth outsourcing your marketing needs or keeping it in-house, you have come to the right place.
Regardless of your business’s area of operations, the main objective of your marketing efforts is to bring in leads and ultimately sales to the company. Whether you keep your marketing services internalised within your organisation or have outsourced your marketing needs to an agency, you may be wondering which would be more effective.
Making use of an outsourced marketing agency allows for allocating specific marketing tasks to specialists who will be able to work more effectively with the time and resources allocated to them. It also keeps costs down, leaving more financial room for your organisation’s growth.
Outsourcing your marketing operations, however, comes with a trade-off. When outsourcing any form of work to any external party, you lose the level of control that you would have had if the marketing was internalised. This does not mean that the marketing agencies that you outsource work to do not include you in the decisions or final output. On the contrary, these agencies often develop a system to ensure that the work that is produced is up to the client’s standards and is achieving what the client has set out to do.
The question remains, how do you know if you should be outsourcing your marketing instead of hiring staff to form your marketing team?
Here are some things that may make it easier for you to decide whether you need to outsource your marketing:
You are not achieving your objectives with an in-house marketing team.
However, it is important to bear in mind that not all goals will be able to be achieved within the first month or two of implementing the team or strategy. However, if you are still finding that the objectives are not being met after a set amount of time, it may be a sign that you need to re-evaluate your marketing team and consider outsourcing to an agency.
You are often running behind your planned schedule
Marketing is about providing reasons and value to potential customers, clients or users for your products or services at the right time. If you are not delivering these, you can lose potential business, which will stump organisational growth. At this point, you may find outsourcing your marketing needs to an external agency more efficient.
Making the shift from traditional to digital marketing.
Traditional marketing has been around for quite some time. With advancements in technology and the availability of this technology to the average person, digital marketing has become a more attractive choice in reaching your target audience. Although digital marketing is not brand new, it is still often viewed as a mythical creature with enough jargon to deter anyone from learning about the subject. With that said, trying to shift an existing traditional marketing team to a digital one can be quite a disaster. It is, therefore, a more logical choice to outsource your digital marketing needs to a dedicated digital marketing agency where everything from marketing strategies to social media management can be tackled. Outsourcing to a digital marketing agency can also be more cost-effective and with the return on investment easily tracked via data analytics and reporting.
It is important to note that at the same time, though it may look more attractive to outsource your marketing to an external agency. Here are some signs that it may be unnecessary:
- One of the first signs that you do not need to outsource your marketing needs to an agency is if your team is already bringing in leads that convert to sales.
- Your marketing team is always evolving, attending marketing conferences, and making suggestions about how they could improve systems, lead generation, and other aspects of the company marketing.
- Your current marketing team is diverse and can cater to the vast forms of marketing required by the business or corporation. If your team can effectively handle all marketing tasks needed by the business, there is no need to outsource your marketing to an external agency.