Outsourcing Digital Marketing: How to Do it Right

Digital marketing is at the core of any successful promotion strategy. With the rise of mobile phones and social media, the power of digital marketing has given brands the tools they need to grow their business. However, some companies don’t have the extra time to handle digital marketing in-house—they’d rather outsource it.

Outsourcing digital marketing is when a brand teams up with a third party to hand off their marketing activities. All marketing agencies are essentially digital marketing outsourcing companies. The third party you choose to work with will create all the consumer-facing content and manage your marketing channels for you. Over ⅓ of all businesses choose to outsource digital marketing because it saves them time, money, and energy. In this article, we’re going to show you how to outsource your digital marketing like a pro.

Outsourcing Digital Marketing #1: Brainstorm

Before you dive into an in-house or outsourced solution, set some time aside to generate ideas and carve out a direction for your brand’s digital marketing journey. Ask yourself key questions about your strategy, brainstorm, and weigh your options when deciding which route to take. It’s a critical step in defining what your digital marketing is going to look like.

In-House or Outsourcing?

The first big question is in-house vs outsourcing. Growing and promoting your business is a full-time job, literally! Before committing to an in-house approach to your digital marketing, make sure your team has the bandwidth, the resources, and the digital marketing experience to carry out key tasks successfully. Some of those tasks are:

• create social media posts
• manage SEO
• write blogs
• craft quality ads
• handle PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns
• create video content
• oversee affiliate programs

And the list just keeps on going. If you’re a small startup, or are just strapped for time, it’s not easy to cultivate a winning digital marketing strategy in-house. That’s why so many brands choose to outsource.

What Are Your Digital Marketing Goals?

Your marketing goals are eventually going to determine whether or not you want to outsource to a digital marketing company your PPC management, blog writing, social media strategy, or the whole shebang! If you want digital marketing to be a flywheel of growth for your brand, then it’s essential that you commit to one route early in the game and stick to it. As you think about your overall marketing goals, keep the following in mind:

Budget

You want to strategically plan and oversee your budget; try to dedicate a meaningful amount of money towards your digital marketing activities to ensure you see a solid ROI. It helps to come up with a daily spending limit, so that you can easily maintain PPC and other paid ads.

Time

Another key component of your digital marketing journey is time: how much can you commit and how much do you have? Plan your progress by setting time-based deadlines and check-ins. Aim for one at 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, and 120 days. That gives your team an interval to measure and track performance.

Reputation

One of the smartest reasons to outsource digital marketing services? Reputation. You get all the credit for crafting high-quality, engaging digital ads that really resonate with users, making your business and brand look extra good.

A Winning Digital Marketing Strategy

Your brand, or your outsourcing company, needs to evaluate your digital marketing stance and come up with an effective strategy. This will be the overarching tactical outlook that your brand will take when approaching digital marketing. It serves as the guiding ideation of your growth.

A Reliable Digital Marketing Plan

The final component of your digital marketing goals is your plan. You and your outsourced partner must come up with an actionable set of tasks that serves as a touchpoint for guidance. Like a set of instructions that should be performed on-schedule, it tells you what to do and when, which also helps you keep track of progress.

Where To Find Stellar Digital Marketing Teams?

Once you’ve done the necessary research and finally made the decision to outsource, where can you find digital marketing outsourcing companies? Let’s dive into a few of the best ones:

Referrals

This is a time-tested source of valuable candidates. Referrals are useful because you trust the person who’s advocating for this company, so you trust that company indirectly. Talk to business partners or colleagues who have seen amplified growth and ask them where they outsourced their digital marketing.

Google

While this resource isn’t as high value as referrals, it’s far more diverse in quantity and depth. You can connect with digital marketing agencies all around the world, who can manage your activities remotely. This broadens the potential pool, increasing the chances of you finding a team that works for you.

Better Business Bureau

This is a third-party bureau that accredits companies that excel in their industry and provide top-class services. They give a letter grade to each company that they accredit, giving you a pretty black and white picture of how well certain marketing teams are. Filter by digital marketing on the BBB website and search for the group that excels in what matters most to you.

Outsourcing Digital Marketing #2: Find the Right Team

When you’ve made the decision to outsource, it comes down to finding the right team. This is a critical step in your journey; it will define your success or failure in digital marketing. The ideal marketing team deeply understands your brand and functions as an extension of you. The wrong team feels disconnected, disinterested, and doesn’t produce the results you’re looking for. Let’s explore the qualities of the right team.

Experience

The primary component of the ideal marketing team is their level of experience.

• Have they worked with brands in your industry before?
• Did they achieve growth?
• Do they have the numbers to back it up?

These are the pressing questions you need to ask when gauging a team’s experience. When their portfolio showcases meaningful results with brands that fit your mold, it builds credibility for the agency. You can trust that they’ll be able to reproduce the same results.

Creativity

The next quality of strong digital marketing agencies is creativity — they all have an imaginative instinct. With so much content and advertising clogging the digital space, it’s hard for brands to cut through the noise. Only original, creative content gets noticed. It takes a unique approach to paid ads or social media to produce the results that you want.

Reporting

Another central element of the right digital marketing team is their reporting: how do they track performance? There are dozens of metrics that are used in the digital marketing space, and each one is valuable in its own right. Conversion rate and impression metrics tell you about a post’s interaction. Customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value tell you how much you’re spending per customer, and how much you’re earning back. Each metric tells a unique story about your ad’s performance. Understand how different agencies report their metrics, and make sure your chosen team uses analytics in a meaningful way.

Communication and Responsiveness

You need a digital marketing team that communicates well and listens to your needs. Especially in a remote work environment, it’s key that teams are reliable and responsive. They shouldn’t make you wait hours or days for a reply to an email. Do they anticipate your needs and “get” your brand? A great team will.

Transparency

It’s key that the agency you choose is transparent about elements of your digital marketing campaign. They should be upfront about costs, schedules, and the achievability of objectives. They should clearly communicate details to you and explicitly relay messages. All matters relating to your digital marketing strategy should be articulated in a speedy manner, so you’re always aware of what’s going on and why.

Outsourcing Digital Marketing #3: Save Money and Be Patient

Digital marketing is a massive industry. The spending on global digital marketing is expected to reach $389.29 billion in 2021. While it may seem counterintuitive, outsourcing digital marketing actually saves you money in the long run. It costs far less to outsource marketing activities than it does to hire an in-house employee to oversee those services. Outsourcing costs between $2000 – $8000, while in-house services would cost you $24,000 – $96,000. That’s a big difference!

It’s clear that outsourcing your digital marketing to a team would save your startup a ton of money without sacrificing growth. That’s why it’s important to be patient. Don’t spend your entire budget in month one, and try to play the long game. It can be months before you see ROI in digital marketing because real growth takes time and effort. Bottom line: don’t expect miracles. Plan for the future and stick to your strategy to see results over time.

Conclusion

Outsourcing digital marketing can be both a game-changer and a lifesaver! It just takes thoughtfulness and dedication to find the team that’s right for you. You need to consider a variety of factors: experience, creativity, reporting style, communication skills, and level of transparency. Above all, it pays to work with a team that understands your business goals and brand vision.

Outsourcing digital marketing improves your productivity, saves you money, and grows your business at the same time. But where to look? That’s where Marketify comes in.

Our small team of industry experts is trained to facilitate a full-scale digital marketing campaign for your business. We have the experience and the results to back up our skills, and we communicate transparently throughout the process. You’ll have one-on-one time with us to understand your goals and learn how we plan to take action to elevate your brand.

For customized marketing that provides a lasting competitive advantage for your brand, set up a meeting with us today.

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