STARTUPS AND SMALL BUSINESS
Why You Should Outsource Marketing For Your Small Business or Startup
5 reasons why outsourcing your marketing is a smart move for your business
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With more and more startups, small businesses, and soloprenuers popping up around the world, it’s harder than ever to market your business effectively and be heard through all the noise. Especially if you’re running a small business or recently founded startup. Budgets are probably small and competition is high.
Outsourcing marketing services is nothing new, and according to recent statistics, the outsourcing market topped $85.6 billion in 2018 ($65 billion of which was from the IT industry).
There’s a load of reasons why businesses choose to outsource their marketing, especially in the early stages. They may be one or more of the following:
- You’re a small company or recently founded startup and budgets are small
- You’re a small company with a marketing team, but they lack the necessary resources, skills, or experience
- You need outside advice or an external point of view without bias
- You’re a small business or startup with past failures and realize you need fresh ideas and new approaches for success
So what kind of marketing services should you consider outsourcing?
Well, in the early stages of your business, basically everything that isn’t focusing on your product or service and how it meets your target customer’s needs.
You may want to consider outsourcing the following:
- Website design
- Branding and logo design
- Paid advertising
- Social media management (if you consider social media as the most important part of your content strategy)
- Content creation (blog posts, videos, infographics, etc)
If you’re running a newly founded business, chances are you’re totally inundated with tasks in all areas of the business. You need to be focusing on developing and improving your product/service, your unique sales proposition (USP), and finances. With all this on your plate, adopting a DIY approach to your branding, website, and content will just result in something that falls far short of what it needs to be.
How much will it cost to outsource marketing services?
A lot less than hiring an internal employee, we can guarantee that. Let’s take a look at what’s required when you hire an internal employee.
- Running job postings and locating candidates
- Paying wages, benefits, pension, etc
- Providing the required resources and equipment
- Training and ongoing professional development
- Providing a physical, fully-equipped workspace
- Managing paid leave and days off
That’s a lot of overhead, and a big blow to your finances if you’re working with a small budget. Not to mention if the person you hired doesn’t work out, you need to repeat the hiring process, costing you more money. The same process with outsourced professionals is a lot cheaper and bears a lot less responsibility on your part.
The benefits of outsourcing digital marketing services
- You work with experts in their respective fields
Whether you choose to collaborate with a freelancer or work with a marketing agency, you already know their experts at what they do. Why? Because a bad agency wouldn’t be able to operate for very long, and a freelancer that’s no good wouldn’t catch your eye in the first place. Not to mention most freelancers and agencies have portfolios of past work that you can look at to see the quality of their work, and the clients they’ve worked with.
If you choose to work with a marketing agency, and they have a nice portfolio, then you already know their experts at what they do, provided you choose a good agency. Agencies are made up of teams of people working in different areas, so your money goes further than if it was paid to an internal employee. These teams also only focus on one thing, so you can be pretty certain that they’re good at what they do.
A website designer isn’t off creating Facebook Ads after their lunch break. They’re back to creating kickass websites.
The same logic applies to freelancers, assuming you find a great freelancer. They normally, and should, specialize in one area. If they have more than one service on offer, then they should at least be very closely related.
2. You get high-quality results in the same (or less) time
Building off point #1, when you work with experts, you get expert results. When you shop around for a great digital agency or freelancer, chances are you’ll choose them based on past high-quality work that you like the look of.
With a do-it-yourself marketing approach, comes a “that’ll do” attitude. Why? Because more likely than not, you’ll be too busy with a million other tasks to put in the time and effort required for your branding, website, or social media content to be the best it could be.
A dedicated freelancer or agency solves that problem. They have more-than-adequate time to spend on your project, and being experts in their respective fields, they’ll ultimately produce a lot more quality work in the same amount of time as you would. They also use, and are skilled in, the newest applications that you may not know well, or even use.
Creating quality content to use on social media and your website, especially content created in programs like the Adobe suite, takes a lot of time and countless hours to learn the intricacies of the program. Having this learning curve eliminated is another advantage for you. You get quality content rolled out quicker, with more consistency.
You need really great content to break through the noise online, and that really great content comes from knowing what you’re doing and having enough time dedicated to achieving the necessary quality.
3. You can focus on your customers and their needs
When you’re not bogged down trying to design your own logo, website, branding, and social media content, you can dedicate the time needed to address your customers, and more importantly, their needs.
After all, your business’ number 1 goal should be solving a particular problem for your target audience. That’s why your business exists in the first place right? You saw a need that wasn’t met by any product/service in the market.
No idea, service, or product is perfect, so having more time to address issues and potential improvements is what’s going to separate your business from your competitors’. You should be constantly aiming to improve your product or service, and having the weight of managing marketing tasks taken off your shoulders definitely helps you do just that.
Although the word “value” is very overused these days, it’s still very important. Your entire business model should operate around your customers and how you can provide the most value possible without expecting anything in return.
4. You collaborate with people who’ve ‘been there, done that’
When you work with a marketing team or experienced freelancer, you’re working with people that have completed similar projects for many other clients, over and over again. This means they know what works, how it works, and when it works. This takes the guesswork out of it on your part.
You can’t kill it at something you’ve haven’t done for very long. It’s just not how it works. We’re not saying that you don’t have what it takes, but if you can’t dedicate sufficient time to something, you’ll probably remain mediocre at it, sorry.s
When you work with a team that’s been there and done that, you inevitably save time that would have been lost brainstorming and executing strategies that may never have worked in the first place. Having someone that lives and works in the trenches means you can rest assured that they know what they’re doing, and how they should do it.
5. You get an outside perspective on your business
This is something we consider so important for any business, but it’s sadly something that’s constantly ignored. An outside perspective or opinion from somebody working with your business is invaluable information that you should treat with the utmost importance.
Why? Because they have less emotional attachment to the business and are less likely to let a bias influence any of their decisions. When you pour your heart, soul, and time into a new business, it becomes very difficult to critique it and find room for improvement.
Enter the outsourced marketing professional. They have no emotional attachment to your business, have probably seen or worked with a similar one, and they know exactly what works and what doesn’t in your industry.
Outside perspectives open your eyes to what you may be missing.
Wrapping Up
Small businesses and startups need fast growth and solid customer acquisition to stay in the game, and having your marketing outsourced, at least temporarily, can help achieve that.
If you decide to go down the do-it-yourself route, you may find that your business will suffer in the long-term, as a result.
Outsourcing is as affordable as it has ever been, and there’s now a plethora of agencies, freelancers, and communities online where you can find the right professional for the job.
Which marketing services are you considering outsourcing to help your business? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
