As a business owner, you’re always looking for that next opportunity that can help your business grow. More business owners are looking to outsource their digital marketing requirements to an agency in order to make the most of the opportunities online.
Survival isn’t a simple task in the online marketplace, with more competitors bolstering their digital marketing efforts than ever before.
While you may have already explored the potential of expanding your marketing efforts, whatever your situation, it’s likely that digital marketing can help your business reach its next milestone.
When considering your options on how to stay ahead of your competitors and grow your business, two options will likely arise when it comes to digital marketing: do you keep it in-house and build an internal marketing team, or do you outsource part or all of your digital marketing to an agency?
There are many reasons for either choice, but in this post, we wanted to help you explore the reasons why outsourcing your digital marketing could be the perfect solution in taking your business to the next level online.
You may be thinking that as we are an agency, of course we would be advocates for outsourcing your digital marketing. But from the beginning of our agency 15 years ago, our Managing Director set-up Xanthos with the aim of helping businesses succeed online through digital marketing, which is why we are so passionate about what outsourced digital marketing can achieve.
We exist because outsourced digital marketing works, and our clients see a benefit in it.
There are three big benefits to outsourcing your digital marketing needs to an agency that understands your business:
- Save on the cost of marketing your business
- Free up your internal resources to focus on your core competencies
- Your business benefits from marketing expertise
To highlight how outsourcing your digital marketing could be the answer you’re looking for, we will explore each of these big benefits in greater depth.
Save Money by Outsourcing your Digital Marketing
The big consideration when weighing up your options is the cost. Outsourcing your digital marketing costs a fraction of what it would cost in order to hire your own team of professionals, and get the same level of expertise.
In order to cover the essential areas of digital marketing, you will need to hire for roles with specific skillsets, including:
- Content marketing and copywriting
- SEO
- Paid Advertising and PPC
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Conversion rate optimisation and analysis
- Design and HTML
The cost to hire at least 5 industry experts can be a huge investment for many businesses. Even if the average salary was £25k a year, you’re still looking at spending over £125k a year on your digital marketing. Outsourcing this to an agency will cost less than half for a comprehensive digital marketing package, and you will have access to seasoned experts.
Even for smaller businesses, hiring just a couple of in-house marketing members isn’t appropriate or even possible.
Outsourced digital marketing packages tend to start at around £1,000 a month, and rise to around £5,000 per month, depending on the requirements. You can see why, just from a cost perspective, partnering with a digital marketing makes sense compared to hiring an in-house team at over double the price.
Other than the initial savings, you also don’t have any of the worries or cost of training up your staff. This training can include continuous professional training, certifications, conferences, and time to stay on top of new updates and releases on matters such as SEO, PPC, social media and other forms of paid advertising.
Another consideration is the management and recruitment costs of hiring your own marketing team. What happens when a member of your team is on holiday, or on maternity? These can be costly affairs, and outsourcing to an agency alleviates you of these costs, and also means you aren’t left vulnerable when your staff members are absent.
Big businesses may already have a marketing department, but still often benefit from an outside agency. A good digital agency will act as another arm of your marketing department, helping to improve the performance of your current marketing, suggesting areas of improvement, and supplementing your internal skillset.
As the online marketplace evolves, as well as marketing techniques, it’s can be an expensive undertaking for businesses to adopt new tools in order to stay ahead online. Any decent digital agency will have access to an array of tools to help their clients, which saves you the cost of investing in the tools yourself. This includes marketing automation, which has become a must-have tool for today’s businesses. Agencies can give businesses access to a marketing automation platform, and offer consultancy on best practices, as well as helping optimise marketing activities and spend.
Benefit from the Knowledge of Seasoned Marketing Experts
Agency marketers work in a dynamic environment, which requires them to update skills and stay up-to-date on the latest trends. Agencies need to stay on top in order to attract clients and offer new services, which benefits your business in the long run. Agencies have also gained expertise in marketing for similar businesses in various industries, meaning they have added knowledge to bring to the table which can benefit your business.
If you’re considering keeping your marketing in-house, consider the fact that in a survey by Infusionsoft and Leadpages almost half of 1000 small businesses owners do not know if they are marketing effectively, with 14% stating they know they aren’t.
Keeping in-house staff up-to-date requires time and training. You will need to identify necessary training to keep your business ahead, and pay for the training itself. With an agency, you don’t need to factor in this time or cost.
For instance, staying on top of SEO in order to gain the best traction in Google’s organic results is not always as simple as it seems. While most businesses understand the importance of keywords and the need to keep websites up-to-date, staying ahead of the curve and competitors is a much more complex ordeal.
An agency will be on top of what Google has in store, whether it’s algorithm updates or alterations to the search experience, and help you push ahead with their SEO and digital marketing expertise in areas where your competitors will not. This gives you a great advantage in gaining the best possible quality level of traffic from the organic search results, to help your business generate sales.
Agencies will also have staff which are experts in different fields, ensuring your business benefits from the best and most up-to-date knowledge in each area of digital marketing. The right digital agency can draw on past experiences building campaigns or developing marketing strategies that get results, and find the best solution for your unique business needs.
Free Up your Internal Resources to Focus on What You Do Best
How often does your team not deliver the marketing materials or campaigns they were supposed to? Staff with numerous responsibilities may feel pressured and overwhelmed when they cannot deliver on the marketing targets, which leads to an uncomfortable working atmosphere which is ultimately not good for your business.
Marketing is often shunned due to restrained internal resources which means staff cannot cope with the workload, but there’s no need to do this. By outsourcing your digital marketing to an experienced agency, you can relieve the pressure on your in-house staff, and free-up your internal resources to be focused elsewhere.
Ascend2 found that 70% of B2B organisations outsource all or part of their digital marketing tactics, primarily the most difficult types to execute.
Outsourcing allows you and your team to focus on your core business competencies where you have expertise. If your staff are spread too thinly across different areas of the business, this allows them to concentrate on the areas where they will make the best use of their time.
It’s likely you’re not an expert in developing a marketing strategy and deploying online marketing campaigns that bring in leads and generate sales. Outsourcing activities that are not your core competencies, such as digital marketing, makes sense. This way you can be assured you have digital marketing experts dedicated to your marketing, while you focus on what you know best.
Agencies are not just there to do the work you don’t have the capabilities to do. A digital marketing agency can become your businesses’ digital marketing department, forming an important partnership that helps to enhance your business’ performance.
At the end of the day, the most important point to take away from this post is just how important digital marketing can be in achieving success. It’s up to you whether to build an in-house team, or hand over the reins to an outsourced digital team that will help you build for the future.
The fact agencies have access to the latest tools and software and a wealth of experience using them is a huge bonus many businesses take advantage of. Here at Xanthos, we offer marketing automation software as part of our outsourced digital marketing package that can generate more leads, increase sales and optimise the ROI of your marketing.
To learn more about what marketing automation can do for your business, get your free download below of “Why Marketing Automation?” and see what it can achieve.