Outsourcing digital marketing is the process of hiring third-party experts or an agency to handle your business’s interactions with potential customers online. This includes things like your social media, website, online content, search result rankings, adverts on Facebook and Google, and much more. A business might outsource all of these things or just some of them.
Like all business decisions, the decision to outsource offers some benefits but also comes with some risks. At the end of the day, it’s about whether it suits the circumstances of a particular company. Here are some of the ways you can know if it is right for you.
1. You lack the resources for an in-house team
Planning and executing digital marketing strategies requires a lot of expertise while also being very time-consuming. Finding new full-time staff with the requisite expertise to form an in-house team promises to be a very expensive endeavour. Not only do digital marketing experts command hefty salaries, but you will also have to spend time on the hiring and training process. Many small companies lack the resources for this. In such cases, hiring an agency with conversion rate optimisation services which can offer the same expertise at a tiny fraction of the cost can be a much better solution.
2. You’ve got a new product or market
Effectively researching how to market a new product or win over a new demographic of people takes time, and that’s time in which you could be making sales but aren’t. However, experts who have handled digital marketing for many different companies and who have successfully reached many different audiences are able to use their experience to deal with new challenges much faster. In the above scenario, outsourcing can drastically cut the amount of time it takes to bring your product or service to market.
3. Your business is growing or pivoting
One of the arguments against in-house marketing teams is that they can get a little bit set in their ways. This means that they will probably find it challenging if you want to change what your business is offering, how it positions itself, or you want to scale the business up. Meanwhile, agencies are used to scaling projects up and down in response to clients’ demands.
Conclusion
Expertise and affordability are the two main benefits of outsourcing digital marketing, but how much of a benefit they will be depends on your company’s resources and goals. Companies with limited funds, new products, or plans to rapidly grow often benefit most from outsourcing.