7 Reasons to Outsource Your Marketing Program

Have you considered outsourcing your marketing program? CMOs often struggle with the decision to outsource or to hire for marketing specialties. For B2B companies in particular, it’s not always a clear-cut decision. However, partnering with a marketing agency is the best way to amplify your marketing campaign efforts – and to boost ROI.

What is an outsourced marketing program?

An outsourced marketing program is simply hiring a group of people outside your business to handle all or some of your marketing responsibilities. When CMOs decide to outsource, they find themselves with extra time and money (we’ll get to that later).

Statistics show that more CMOs are choosing to outsource marketing efforts than ever before. The 2016 Gartner Marketing Organizational Design and Strategy Survey found that more than 40% of marketers say they plan to increase their use of agencies in the next three to five years. Moreover, 57% of B2B technology marketers are outsourcing their content marketing, which includes writing, designing, editing, documenting, and distribution efforts. The increasing perception among CMOs is that agencies deliver superior quality and performance while working alongside their marketing staff, and sometimes acting as a marketing staff.

Here are our top seven reasons you should consider outsourcing.

1. Access to a professional marketing team

Are you a marketing team of one or two? Outsourcing can make your campaigns look like they came from an enterprise marketing department. You’ll have a team of marketing specialists in your back pocket, ready for advice or instruction. It’s how you use these tools that will define your success. Although you could do it yourself, why carry the load alone? Enlisting a team of marketing specialists is a smart way to focus on your strengths, and get help where needed.

2. Decreased marketing overhead

It can take months to find a good marketing employee with the specialized skill you’re looking for. It will take additional months to ramp the new hire to the point where they’re producing quality work. Multiply that by three or four to establish a marketing team, and you’ve lost about a year of productive time when you could have sought skilled, experienced outside help from the beginning. Save your time and money by outsourcing to professionals who live and breathe marketing.

3. Build marketing infrastructure

An outsourced marketing department will establish a system of programs, processes, and functions which can later be used by your internal team. Some of the most time-consuming and nit-picky aspects of marketing are the technical nuances, which require the assistance of tech-savvy individuals to implement them. Unless you enjoy (and are experienced with) coding websites, writing and optimizing polished ad copy, or combing through Google Analytics for insights, these are tasks best left to professionals.

4. Save time

If you have an idea for a marketing campaign but no team to implement it, an outsourced marketing group can pull from its broad experience to strategize and activate the plan. Don’t let your great ideas get lost due to a shortage of resources. Let your marketing agency do the work for you – while you reap the benefits.

5. Solve the bandwidth restrictions of your overworked internal team

You can outsource marketing and still keep your marketing staff. It’s best when the two teams work together, because no one knows your company better than you and your employees. Often companies will cherry-pick which services and projects they need help with, and which they can manage with internal resources. It’s crucial to think of your agency as part of your team and not a replacement.

6. Dedicated focus on specific marketing projects

It’s a good practice to outsource with specific projects in mind, to help you find the right partner. Need a website redesign in 2017? Find an agency with experience in designing websites. Do you just need blogs written and published? Seek those with content marketing backgrounds. The marketing profession contains many niche subcategories, and you can find dozens of marketing specialties within one agency. A good outsourced marketing partner will encapsulate this range of skills, so no corner of influence goes unexplored.

7. Clarity of marketing ROI

This one hits home for many marketers, either in-house or outsourced. Marketing firms will place immense importance on proving ROI, because that’s how they retain you as a happy client. Share these results with your executive team, and BOOM! You’re a marketing hero! Numbers don’t lie. If a marketing agency is not fulfilling your desired quota, you will always have the statistics to justify your displeasure.

Spend time doing research to find a marketing agency that shares your values and approach. Talk to them, talk to clients that have hired them, look at their marketing materials, and review their client portfolio to understand who they attract. The more comfortable you feel with a marketing agency, the more trust you can give them to be the professionals they are.

Thinking about outsourcing your marketing?
Contact us, and we’ll talk you through it.

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