Nobody knows your organisation, product or service better than you. This is one of the reasons why outsourcing your marketing can be such a tricky decision to make.
Why do businesses rely on third party marketing support? According to surveys from inbound marketing experts HubSpot, around 32% of business owners outsource because they don’t have time to learn about marketing and apply it to their campaigns.
So should you outsource? Will it add value? Here are the top three benefits of outsourcing your marketing:
BENEFIT 1 – Time and cost savings
When you outsource you get access to top level marketing experts when you need them, plus you’ll only pay for the services you use for as little or long as you require them.
You don’t have to pay for in-house marketers in between projects and you avoid the costs associated with employing staff, such as National Insurance, recruitment fees, sick pay and holidays. You’ll also be free to focus on the other areas of your business, and your marketing won’t get pushed to the back burner regardless of how busy you are.
For example, Neil Wadsworth, Managing Director of financial advisory firm Anderson Locke, was able to focus on adding value to his business after eliminating the opportunity cost of doing his own marketing. The end result: an £800 lead generation campaign that generated £40,000 of business. (Want to find out more? Read the full case study ‘I generated £40,000 worth of business with a lead generation campaign.’)
BENEFIT 2 – Easy access to all the marketing skills you need
You get better value from outsourcing your marketing to an agency because it’s simply not possible for one in-house person to do everything an agency can do. The fact is that you’re not going to find a single employee who’s an expert in direct marketing, social media, PR, graphic design, strategy and copywriting.
Expecting one person to deliver on all counts is an unreasonable ask, and as a result something always falls by the wayside, opportunities included. The beauty of appointing an integrated agency is that you get experts in everything, so you can tap into what you need when you need it.
Outsourcing your marketing also frees up everyone else in your business to focus on the areas where they add the most value. The fact is that marketing is a different skill set to, for example, manufacturing, quality assurance or software development. Just as you wouldn’t expect a chartered engineer to do the job of the finance director, you can’t expect a general manager, sales director or even managing director to be an expert in marketing.
BENEFIT 3 - Fresh ideas and an objective point of view
When your head’s immersed in your business it’s easy to do things a certain way because ‘that’s the way you’ve always done it.’ This leads to miss opportunities.
For example, Midlands manufacturer BSC Diecasting & Finishing, didn’t think that customers used search engines as part of the purchasing process. Analytical tools revealed that online research was actually very important in procurement, and BSC was able to launch a new website optimised for search. This new site put BSC ahead of the competition, with the new approach generating £2.7million in leads in the first week. (Read the full story, ‘How a good rebrand helped generate £2.7m of leads.’
Thus, because an agency combines an objective perspective with knowledge of the latest marketing innovations and techniques, you get shrewd advice on what will give you the most value.
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