7 ½ Reasons Why You Should Outsource Your Digital Marketing.
This can be both a strategic and a tactical decision, even if your company doesn't usually have a philosophy of outsourcing services.
This can be both a strategic and a tactical decision, even if your company doesn’t usually have a philosophy of outsourcing services.
How to know what is right for your organisation? Should you outsource a particular project, should you do it in-house or completely outsource the whole digital marketing sphere.
1. Lack Of Expertise
To be effective in this field there is an element of expertise in various sub-specialities. Unless you are a multi-national ginormous company, it will be hard to have event organisers, brand managers, copywriters, social media analytics, communication specialists, SEO and PPC and all this talent in-house. Yet, digital marketing companies who offer B2B services will have most of these skill-sets inbuilt into their organisation.
2. Specific Technology
Again, because this is not your core business, you probably don’t have the tools, technology or infrastructure to be as efficient as specialised companies. Outsourcing marketing functions would solve the problem of integrating marketing applications. These companies would have better skills in adapting the latest marketing tools and software accordingly. It simply makes financial sense to access their technology rather than yourself buying it all up.
3. Variability
Let’s talk money now; your company’s biggest marketing costs are salaries, systems and facilities. Besides the fact that marketing organisations need to continuously adapt to changes in demographics, platform and trends, specialised digital marketing companies would be more flexible in that shift. There are various hidden costs in maintaining internal fixed marketing assets. Amongst others delays, attrition, lack of support and expansion are examples of costs, which fluctuate depending on external factors. Scaling up and scaling down is easier if you outsource a service, whilst doing so internally has endless logistical issues.
4. Best Practice
It is hard to have a vast portfolio of projects and hence the experience of one of these digital marketing companies. Doing it yourself, your company might have some experienced individual yet that is dwarfed compared to the pool of talent in digital marketing companies. Many of these companies would understand in various dimensions the data models, process flows, and partnerships. You are accessing a myriad of experts in this field with years of experience; it’s hard to beat that.
5. New Waters
Venturing into new markets or new customer channels poses a number of challenges, opportunities and pitfalls. The bolder the move the more you need to rely on experienced digital marketing companies which are already in that field to achieve your goals. Trial and error is costly and will slow your momentum, whilst cultural mistakes might compromise the whole move. Implementing a new channel requires a lot of expertise that most companies simply do not have.
6. Growth
Building marketing functional groups in times of growth with all the hiring and training it involves will inevitably slow you down. In these periods, the scale of growth and market response is hard to predict and likewise hard to build an adequate team. In periods of company expansion, the more you can limit variable risk the better. Outsourcing, once again, would mitigate that risk.
7. Boom And Bust
Like all companies you might experience investment highs and lows; as always, marketing investments are the first to go and only after the storm is over does the next round of investments gets approval. Switching between one cycle and the other incurs an expense associated with staff erosion, exhaustion and attrition. Outsourcing offers greater flexibility in pausing and starting again without the drag of doing this internally.
7.5. Time
In your marketing department you will have various specialities like promotion, position, customer relationship, channels, transaction data, essentially the core functions of the marketing strategy. All other functions that are not core, like digital marketing would serve as a distraction to that strategic element and can be effectively outsourced. In short, you don’t have the time to stay watering a new plant in the business garden, you have your crop to harvest and quickly before winter comes. Because as we all know, Winter Is Coming!
Original Article
Find out more on the future of Business at our DLUK - Trends Briefing on the 24th September 2015