Why would I outsource my digital marketing?

This is a question which often comes up when we speak with business owners, marketing directors, sales directors or HR departments. Companies may be currently doing part of this themselves, thinking of upskilling staff or trying to replace a member of staff. So where could outsourcing be appropriate?

In the first instance lets define the term digital marketing, for the purpose of this article we will define this as anything and everything you may do in the digital space: website development, social media marketing, paid ads on both search and social media, content writing, customer care, strategy, web and social analytics, sales and marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization and the list could go on. So clearly digital marketing covers a wide range of skill sets.

So what are the advantages of outsourcing?

Diversity of specialized skills.

To have one individual within a company to have all the necessary skills can be very difficult, especially considering digital marketing will not be your specialty.  However within a digital marketing agency a rich blend of all these individuals will be available and at your disposal. It’s true to say that someone who builds reports in analytics, may well be just the right individual to up skill and build an automated email marketing campaign, however the content of those very emails will be a whole new skill set. So the first advantage of using an agency is the diversity of the skills set.

No need to employ someone for the role.

There are drawbacks to employing someone specifically for the role such as legal and HR complications, added to the fact that you have many hidden cost for example employee national insurance, pension contributions and holiday pay. Importantly agencies can always assure the continuation of work, so you don’t have to worry about being left with no cover  when an employee is off sick or on holiday.

No extra training and development costs in order to keep pace with continued advancements and changes in the digital space.

The world of digital media marketing, whether this be social media marketing, email marketing, paid advertisements and all the other areas we discussed earlier are subject to rapid change, therefore companies have to invest large amounts of time and money in training and development. Due to the increasingly specialist nature of  the digital space, this training normally has to be sourced from companies who are able to provide trainers and  who are at the cutting edge of their field, this in itself leads to an increase in costs.

So in summary we can say outsourcing digital marketing gives you

  • Access to a team of experts

  • A team that are ready to perform from day 1

  • You won’t have to rely on having a few generalists as the agency will have individuals who are specialist in one key area, such as paid advertisements and this is all they do every day.

  • You wont have down time in your digital marketing from staff issues, holidays or sickness

  • No need to up skill staff in the  rapidly moving environment of digital marketing, so less training cost.

  • You’re probably going to find that you will actually save money and see better results.

We would welcome your thoughts and experiences on this subject, have you outsourced and how was it? Are you currently looking to outsource digital marketing what kind of considerations are there for you?

We look forward to hearing your comments.