The benefits of outsourcing your marketing

The marketing industry has changed a lot since the days of brick and motor dominance, and understanding the value agencies like consultants like those within Socialegacy can change the prospects of your business.

A good agency understand the challenges and goals of the businesses they work with and deliver work that aims to meet those goals. Well, the good ones definitely do anyway.

As a company we’ve come to realize that most businesses don’t need teams of full-time employees. A successful digital marketing strategy needs to span across multiple channels, but you don’t have to put the same time, budget and resources into each one.

If you hire specialists for each channel then some would probably spend a lot of time twiddling their thumbs and get very bored and unmotivated. The alternative is to hire people who manage multiple channels, but they end up not being as effective because they aren’t specialists.

And when it comes to being immersed in the business, there’s no denying that an employee can do this far better than an agency or consultancy, but you probably don’t need them to become quite so involved to be successful.

In fact, being so immersed into a business can work against you as your employees have little frame of reference for what good marketing or good results are in other businesses. It can also help a lot to see strategies for other businesses, and even other industries, that can be applied internally after a few tweaks and adjustments.

The problem with outsourcing your marketing

Since helping to found Socialegacy I’ve  come to realize 2 significant benefits to outsourcing your marketing that I hadn’t necessarily considered before:

1. Constant development

The first is that the people in agencies and consultancies are constantly developing and evolving their marketing skills. Most marketers will say that they stay up to date by reading industry blogs, watching videos, and downloading resources but few will do so as much as someone in an agency or consultancy.

Being surrounded by other marketers day in and day out means that you have the opportunity to learn from others first hand while they work on other campaigns. Plus we have internal slack channels where the best articles, videos and case studies are, not only shared, but discussed, so there is a deeper understanding of each topic.

I can’t stress enough how valuable it has been for me to have other experienced marketers around when I’m trying a new strategy or tactic. I’m able to ask the team if they have had any similar experiences with clients and then adapt their learning to make sure that my campaigns and experiments are a success.

When I was previously the most senior person in marketing teams that option wasn’t available. I could ask for colleagues or managers opinions, but without the experience to back those opinions up they were just a best guess. The internet is full of people sharing their experiences but they can’t all be trusted, and there’s no substitute for discussing those experiences face to face rather than reading them off a screen.

As well as learning from other people, there’s the experience that comes from working on other clients. Working with bigger clients can help ensure that you set smaller client campaigns to scale effectively. On the other side of the coin, smaller clients can force you to learn hacks and shortcuts that can be applied on bigger clients.

Then there’s the benefit of applying strategies and tactics multiple times across clients, giving you the opportunity to learn each time, and understand the strategy or tactic much better.

Not only will these marketers up skill more effectively, but the good ones will also share what they learn with their clients to help them improve their marketing campaigns.

2. Access to tools & platforms

As well as access to experienced team members, marketing companies will have access to dozens of tools and platforms that most businesses won’t. For example, we could easily spend $100,000 plus a year on developing new marketing tools which we can use on any of our client campaigns. You see, our ultimate goal is to build a portfolio of companies that are so attractive that we would consider purchasing those companies if they ever came up for sale.

So if you are burning the candle at both ends, you may want to outsource those aspects of your business that seem to slow your creativity down. Your job as CEO of  You, Inc. is to build the future of your company and, you can’t do that spending your limited free time figuring out marketing algorithms.