Top 5 Pros & Cons for Outsourcing Digital Marketing
Estimated Time Reading: 4 minutes
Intended Audience: B2B Business Owners, SaaS Organization Owners
Every company has struggled with the decision of whether to outsource their digital marketing or hire an in-house employee. The role of marketing in every organization has grown exponentially in the last decade, especially with the rise of technology. Digital marketers are responsible for all things SEO, SEM, social media, web, content, and MarTech, which can be an enormous undertaking depending on the size of your organization. So the million-dollar question is, should you outsource your organization’s digital marketing?
Deciding to outsource your digital marketing can be a tough decision, so we have put together a list of five pros and cons of outsourcing your SEO, SEM, and other B2B digital marketing efforts initiatives.
PROS: Outsourcing Digital Marketing
1. Highly Experienced Digital Marketing Expert
When outsourcing your digital marketing there are many marketing professionals available with decades of experience, working with hundreds of clients through the same issues you are facing today. When hiring a full-time employee, there is always a training period where you need to take time to get them up to speed with no guarantee he/she has the skill set you need to attain your business goals. On the flip side, an outsourced digital marketing professional is already highly trained and well versed in things like SEO and SEM and won’t require any training. Similar to hiring a full-time employee, you can go through an ‘interview’ process until you’ve found the most experienced outsourced digital marketing professional or agency that best aligns with your needs.
2. Dedicated and Tenacious Resource
3. Current on Latest Marketing Tech, Industry Trends, and Algorithm Changes
4. Budgeting Made Easy
Unlike a full-time employee, when you outsource your digital marketing, you can pay them per project, or per hour needed rather than year-round. This makes it easier to budget for digital marketing, as you can set aside an additional budget for the project you’re working on. In the long run, having an outsourced digital marketing professional can save you money from having to pay another annual salary, plus benefits, taxes, office expenses, vacation/sick time, etc. of a full-time head count.
5. Continuous Learning, Improving, and Perfecting
With the decades of experience outsourced digital marketing professionals/agencies bring to the table to serve your organization with thousands of hours of digital marketing practice under their belt, there is constant learning, evolution, and improvement. Every project worked on for various clients is a learning, whether it be SEO, SEM, or web design. This allows the contract or agency professional to continually learn from each client project and experience different ways to approach similar challenges.
CONS: Outsourcing Digital Marketing
1. Not Familiar with the Your Business
One of the major cons to outsourcing your digital marketing is that they don’t know your business as well as potentially someone in-house. Outsource digital marketing professionals have to learn a lot about your business in a short time, whereas in-house people get thorough training on a regular basis. Even though outsourced digital marketing professionals are experts in content, webinars, website management, and more, it is a steep learning curve applying their expertise to your specific organization and industry.
2. Not Present For Office Changes
An outsourced digital marketing professional is limited in that they aren’t involved in the office day-to-day. This is a con because it doesn’t allow them to be physically present when change happens. If something significant happens at the office, it could impact the direction of marketing goals, initiatives, and campaigns. Since the outsourced professional isn’t there to witness it firsthand, they will be slower to learn of and implement the changes due to the physical communication gap.
3. Not Apart of the Internal Team
Marketing employees are unique in your organization, in the fact that often have to wear many hats. Marketing needs to closely interrelate with other departments, such as Sales, Product, and even IT. Communicating with each of these departments is key to ensuring marketing materials are accurate and effective. A con to outsourcing digital marketing is that they don’t actively collaborate day-to-day with the internal team as often or as effectively as an internal employee.
4. Not Available Full-Time
An important thing to remember about outsourcing digital marketing is that you’re not their only client. The digital marketing professional/agency is juggling multiple projects at a time, making them less available than a full-time employee would be day-to-day. If a project for a different client is more time sensitive, it may take priority.
5. Not Comparable Hourly
Outsource Digital Marketing the Right Way
As you may have concluded, it pays to do your research and run your numbers. These cons can be tackled by making some strategic business process changes. You can clearly define a communication cadence with your outsourced digital marketing professional/agency to span gaps in collaboration. In addition, you can have them map strategic marketing initiatives for set periods of time and review them intermittently to ensure you are always top of mind and are getting consistent ROIs.
Meet with multiple different outsourced professionals/agencies until you find one that you trust and has the experience and clientele to back it. Discover if they have worked with organizations, like yours, in the same industry. It also helps to ask to speak to previous clients to receive feedback on their experience working together.
Maven Collective Marketing is the B2B marketing agency that can take care of all your Microsoft Partner Marketing needs. If you are seeking an award-winning agency that works on measurable expertise as an extension of your team, look no further than the Mavens. Get in touch with the Mavens today!
