There's no right or wrong answer when the company wants to outsource a marketing team or hire its own team. When considering this question, you should figure out the needs of your business and the goals you want to achieve. This article will explore the pros and cons of marketing team outsourcing, the risks, and the strategies a company can apply.
But at the beginning, let's see what the main goals and challenges of a marketing team in a company are:
- Marketing generates traffic and leads.
- Train the company team to generate traffic and leads.
- Quite often, marketing lacks resources such as money, people, and time.
- The marketing team is often short of qualified specialists.
- Create engaging content for social media and blogs to raise brand awareness and attract new customers.
So, when a company needs marketing development, it has two options:
- Option 1: Outsource marketing tasks to freelancers or a marketing agency.
- Option 2: Hire your own in-house marketing team.
When Should You Consider Outsourcing A Marketing Team?
There are several cases when outsourcing is a good idea:
- When your budget is limited, a company can seek specialists that charge less for their work. In addition, you can save up some budget by not paying extra taxes, sickness leaves, and holidays.
- There are no professional marketing specialists or copywriters working on your team.
- Business growth is slow and depends on the season.
- Your business is not online yet, but you want it to be there.
- You need only one particular specialist for short-term goals.
- The content is outdated.
- You don't want or can't employ a full-time marketer.
- When you want to keep your most valuable resources focused.
When Should You Hire Your Own Marketing Team?
Outsourcing may sound like a great idea, but there are several reasons you'd better have a team in-house:
- When your client information is strictly confidential.
- You have long-term goals in marketing development and want to grow your own team.
- You don't want to work with third parties such as freelancers or agencies.
When choosing, you should weigh all costs against the return on investment (ROI). Regardless of your choice, measuring the ROI gives you an idea of what your teams, whether outsourced or in-house, can achieve and if you need more help.
Generally, outsourcing your digital marketing or a hybrid approach are cost-effective ways to achieve growth, save time, and enhance return on marketing investment.
What Can You Outsource?
The answer to this question depends on your company's budget and business needs, but in general, you can outsource any of the following marketing tasks:
- Content marketing
- SEO
- Email marketing
- Social Media
- Lead generation
- Brand Voice Development
- Marketing automation
- Marketing analytics and dashboards
- Design
- Copywriting
Risks Of Outsourcing
Like any business process, outsourcing can bring some threads to a company:
- There are some highly confidential documents that you can't share with anyone. Outsourcing always has risks of information leaks.
- Internal morale and accountability issues. Depending on what functions you plan to outsource, your existing employees might feel insecure when you bring on a new marketing specialist.
- Costs can rise. Usually, outsourcing is considered to be way cheaper for a business than an in-house team. However, some firms can say that outsourcing increases their marketing costs when agencies can raise their prices due to inflation or a crisis. Looking for a new agency can take extra time, money, and resources.
- Some business owners believe freelancers are less efficient workers whose working hours are more difficult to control than in-house workers.
Marketing Development Strategies
Outsourcing or not outsourcing is not the only option. When choosing the right way to achieve your marketing goals, you can use some other strategies which can be helpful:
Strategy A. All functions are done in a company
This strategy works well for companies that do not need to perform complicated marketing tasks or for those which have highly skilled marketing teams.
Strategy B. Some functions are outsourced
Usually, this approach is used by firms that try to handle most of their marketing inside the firm even if they aren't experts at them. These firms outsource only when they don't have the skills to carry out a particular task (such as designing and coding a website).
Strategy C. Outsource specialized functions
This strategy is to attract experts that will work on the most technical aspects of their marketing. A relatively low-level in-house marketing team takes care of the more straightforward tasks.
Strategy D. Most specialized functions and some routine operations are outsourced
Firms at this level maintain a small marketing team to handle a few tasks they want to keep close to home. But the majority of their marketing is done by agencies and freelancers.
Strategy E. All functions outsourced
This strategy is used when a business wants all marketing, including much of the strategy, to be done by a third-party team. This team works closely with management to align the marketing strategy with overall business objectives. Company management assesses the results.
Generally, outsourcing your digital marketing or a hybrid approach are cost-effective ways to achieve growth, save time, and enhance return on marketing investment.
Before you need to decide whether you outsource or hire in-house, the questions below will help you to make the right decision:
- Who should you hire first?
- How much will it cost?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of our current marketing team (if you have one), and how can you best use them? What are they struggling with? What do they do best?
- What kind of metrics do we want to track with outsourcing collaboration?
- What is the best marketing strategy they should be implementing for your business?
- Where can you go to find marketers who know what they're doing?
- What should you look for when hiring your marketing person/team?
