4 Great Reasons to Outsource your Marketing (Small Business Edition)
Three items that often top lists titled “Struggles of Small Business Owners” are three key challenges: financial strain, staffing and marketing. If you’re a small business operator and find yourself identifying with this, it makes sense to consider outsourcing your marketing activities to a skilled and experienced marketing professional. Three birds really can be killed with one stone: outsourcing can lead to better marketing outcomes, be a relief to your current staff and ease financial pressures!
Reason 1: Outsourcing can cost you less than hiring a permanent marketing resource.
For many small businesses, keeping headcount low is central to keeping cashflow in check. However, there is a quality vs cost conundrum here. On one hand, your brand’s growth can only be fostered with the love of a highly experienced marketing specialist, but on the other, you can’t afford the $120,000+ asking salary per year to employ a full-time senior marketing resource. If you’re thinking part-time is the way to go – this is sometimes possible if you’re lucky – but the pool of eligible marketing candidates with the right level of experience willing to work part-time is limited.
Of course, the cost of employing permanent staff doesn’t stop at salary: there is a value to your time spent recruiting and on-boarding an employee, the cost of the space and equipment they take up in your office, payroll tax, superannuation, annual, sick and personal leave, and recruitment costs. I’m getting a headache just thinking about it! Some estimate that the real cost of a permanent employee is actually 1.4 times their annual salary.
The best thing to do here is to consider what your top marketing priorities are and consider hiring a marketing agency to fulfil those objectives. For reasons I’ll go into further below, you may find that outsourcing is a way to access more skill, for less financial outlay each month.
Reason 2: You can more quickly access skills and experience by using an outsourced marketer.
Marketers that have started their own consulting businesses are usually highly experienced professionals that have held high responsibility jobs throughout their careers. Marketing consultants are often at the stage where they have built up a great track record of achievements in their marketing roles, and have decided to take the plunge and start their own thing.
It can be attractive for small businesses to hire junior staff as they are more affordable. There is nothing wrong with this and this absolutely works in many situations. However, when your business is cash-strapped, you are time poor, and you have considerable growth objectives that need to be met quickly, it can be a better option to consider outsourcing to a professional that can call on their years of experience to take care of things for you rapidly.
It’s also worth noting that keeping up to date with developments in digital marketing technology is a job in itself. Search engines and social media platforms now make thousands of algorithm updates every year – it’s hard for anyone to keep up, let alone to expect a staff member to keep right on top of all the nuances, on your business’s time.
In order to offer the best service to their clients in a highly competitive market, marketing consultants must keep up to speed. Believe me, the digital marketing nerds amongst us read all the riveting blogs and listen to the latest SEO podcasts – and we do this in our own time, not on our the client’s clock.
Reason 3: You’ll likely see better outcomes and more accountability when you contract out your marketing.
It’s easy for businesses to fall into the habit of rolling out the same activity using the same channels, over and over again. There are a number of different causes for this: sometimes staff can become complacent* and sometimes it’s an unwillingness from the management team try new things or experiment. Whatever the reason, it can leave your brand in a less than ideal situation, seeing your engagement and conversions decline over time. Even when marketing KPIs are in place, ensuring your staff are meeting them can require time out of your own day to manage and oversee.
External marketing consultants can present new paths and ideas that may not have been considered previously. They tend to have more experience using a range of channels, platforms and tools and have gained best practise learnings from working with a range of businesses in different industries.
As a professional marketing services provider it’s in my best interest to ensure my clients’ campaigns are successful and lead to good ROI. If they don’t, then my clients will not achieve the revenue results needed to retain me. Successful and happy customers are my livelihood.
When you use an outsourced marketing professional, the buck stops with the consultant!
*Let me be clear, this is not always the case – there are so many brilliant marketers peddling very hard to grow the businesses they work in (I’d like to think I was one up until I started my own business!). I simply wish to highlight the various marketing options that are available to small businesses.
Reason 4: You have more flexibility when you outsource your marketing.
If you’re not seeing the results you wanted from the efforts of your internal marketing resource, you have few options:
Let go of your underperforming employee – a very tough task that can be an emotional rollercoaster for all parties;
Performance manage your employee. But do you have extra time in your day for that? Moreover, do you have the technical knowledge to know what it is you’re pushing them to achieve?;
Do it yourself – for obvious reasons of having no time, this is often not an option!
It can be much harder to let go of an employee, or performance manage them than it is to end an engagement with an external provider. It’s that simple.
You also have more flexibility to dial up what your marketing consultant is providing you when the need arises: you might operate in a seasonal business such as events and have peaks and troughs of work that needs doing. You can dial down your engagement with a consultant with more ease as well, cutting back hours to focus on the highest priority activities.
Bonus thought: Thinking of tacking marketing tasks on to an existing staff member’s role to save money? Stop!
‘If the task is once begun, never leave it till it’s done. Be the labour great or small, do it well, or not at all’.
- Someone Smart.
In my time working with small businesses, I’ve seen staff members who have no marketing experience (or interest in it, for that matter) being handed the reins to all the social media accounts, the email newsletter and the website content management system, tasked with being the voice of the brand. This can be a good stopgap if a marketing resource leaves but is often not an ideal long-term solution for businesses looking for growth.
I’ve also seen businesses create hybrid roles that mash marketing responsibilities in with an admin role. These jobs are too junior for a qualified marketer, but even a gun admin professional can come with no knowledge of marketing, brands, digital platforms and little understanding of metrics and what success looks like.
What this leaves is inconsistency in marketing efforts (slapdash posting frequency, little to no conversions due to a lack of understanding of messaging, I could go on!). If you’re dedicated to using marketing to grow your business, you are best to give it the attention it deserves!