Do you need a marketing team but can’t justify full-time marketing staff? Or as a larger business, have you considered outsourcing parts of or your entire marketing program? Businesses large and small often struggle with the decision to outsource or hire for marketing specialties. Whether complementary to your existing team or as a replacement for full-time staff, outsourcing can pay dividends in many ways.
A recent survey revealed, in 2018, 63% of companies outsource their marketing, with about a 20% of these companies granting full management of their marketing program to an agency. Outsourced marketing can deliver significant efficiency gains for businesses large and small. It can keep fixed costs low, increase the speed at which marketing results are delivered, keep internal marketing resources focused on high value activities, and help position the company against competitors.
So, what is outsourced marketing?
Outsourced marketing is when a business contracts an external agency - on a project or ongoing basis - to resource and implement marketing strategies and activities, for example; market research, development of marketing strategies & plans, production of sales collateral, digital marketing, lead generation and so on.
What are the benefits?
1. Access to a professional marketing team
Are you doing your marketing alone or have a small and stretched team? Outsourcing to an external marketing team can manage and produce all your outbound marketing and make your brand look professional too. You’ll have a team of marketing experts at the ready to guide you strategically and then develop the collateral and campaigns needed to achieve your business or campaign goals.
2. Save Time
Marketing staff or business owners are often stretched fulfilling day-to-day responsibilities. This often leaves no time for strategic thinking, development of promotional campaigns to support sales, let alone urgent product launches and ongoing digital marketing (such as social media, blog writing, video production). An external marketing team can pull from its broad experience to strategise and activate a plan or campaign and commit the needed time to ensure all activities are produced professionally and on time.
3. Reduced Costs with More Output
It’s expensive to have an in-house marketing team. From HR and recruitment, to training and salaries, it can be a long, expensive process to find good people that can produce the results needed.
Consider the cost for a Marketing Manager alone, at $120-200K p.a. (and that’s just one individual not a team). Instead when outsourcing, your business can have the support of an entire external team of marketing professionals including top level strategists, copywriters, designers, digital media experts, web developers and so on - at half that cost or less.
4. Support for your Internal Team
As supported resources, you can outsource marketing to complement your internal marketing team. It works best when the two teams work together, and work to each other’s strengths.
Often companies will assign the services or projects they need help with, and which activities they can manage internally. It’s fundamental to think of your agency as part of your team and not a replacement.
5. Increase your Talent Pool
By bringing in experts of various disciplines – strategy, design, copywriting, digital marketing etc. - you instantly increase your own talent pool.
Often as marketing needs become more complex or your market becomes more competitive, in-house teams may not have the skills to implement higher level marketing. This is where outsourcing to a more experienced external marketing team can bring effectiveness gains. These external resources will have the skills, tools, and expertise needed to coordinate and execute marketing campaigns across multiple channels.
6. Fresh Perspective
Sometimes in-house marketers and designers can become stale or myopic when looking to promote their products/services or solve business problems. By bringing in an external marketing team to help with strategy, creative, branding, and content; you tap into the ingenuity and inventive ideas of outside resources. This helps propel creativity and avoid limitations of tunnel vision
7. Consistency, Integration & Impact
Professional Marketers know the importance of brand consistency and marketing integration of your brand across multiples channels. Not only will your brand be presented professionally, with a wow factor – your brand’s awareness and following will be enhanced by branding that is seamless and consistent across all available channels - from websites to print to social (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube etc.) and beyond.
8. Keen Analysis & Reporting
Marketing is best serviced with continual measurement – for performance monitoring, insights and data. All marketing from branding to campaigns, can be tracked and measured.
The software tools needed can be costly with the average agency investing $15-$100K per year in software alone, but it’s the IP that goes with analysing the data that gives the greatest benefit to businesses.
At BEAM, we ensure ALL our activities are measured and tracked with BEAM Intel. It also aligns with our business name acronym “Brand Evolution & Accountable Marketing”.
We continually measure and monitor all brand’s, their websites and campaigns and refine where necessary, to maximise the effectiveness of our customer’s brands and their marketing activities.
Need a Marketing Team?
BEAM’s Marketing packages aim to completely resource or complement your business’ needs with our team of experts in marketing, branding and lead gen. All packages include sound strategy, meetings, campaigns, design, measurement for effectiveness and more – all geared to achieve your business objectives.
Click here to read more about our External Marketing Team.
Need help planning your marketing strategy?
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