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7 Marketing Activities To Outsource Now

Whether you are a new business owner or an experienced entrepreneur, outsourcing marketing activities can be a great way to reduce costs and increase your product/service capacity. Outsourcing can be defined as โ€œthe strategic use of outside resources to perform activities traditionally handled by internal staff and resourcesโ€. Thus this allows companies to improve their service whilst reaping huge cost-saving benefits.

However, it can often be hard to know which resources and activities should be outsourced and what marketing activities are best left with yourself. Thus, we have compiled a list of 7 different marketing activities, including SEO, social media and email marketing, that would be perfect to outsource.

7 Marketing Activities To Outsource Now

SEO

If you ever find yourself in need of SEO (also known as Search Engine Optimisation) help, then outsourcing your SEO activities may be a good choice for you.

SEO is a great way to help businesses create optimized, effective and user-friendly websites which increases its search engine rank. In other words, the main benefit of SEO is increased website traffic which in turn will lead to higher conversion rates, leads and sales.

Even though SEO is extremely important to a brand’s online presence, it can be quite hard to implement. The SEO landscape is constantly changing and there are always new SEO hurdles and obstacles to overcome, thus SEO takes a lot of skill and expertise. This whole process requires countless hours of keyword researching and data analytics, so to an SEO beginner, it may take multiple trials and errors for you to find your groove. For these reasons, it may be more beneficial for you and your company to outsource SEO efforts.

SEO experts are trained and highly skilled in this area and can save your business time and money. SEO professionals will spend time researching keywords, creating meta descriptions and using link-building techniques to increase your websiteโ€™s visibility so that you have the best chance of being exposed to as many individuals as possible.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best ways to connect businesses with their prospects and customers. Email marketing can allow you to create targeted and personalised messages specifically designed for your audience, thus helping to build a meaningful and lasting relationship.

A true email marketing campaign requires hours and several touchpoints to implement properly. More importantly, it requires certain sets of skills, for example, design, data analysis, A/B Testing or marketing strategy; as well as knowledge of the right tools and applications to carry out campaigns. Therefore outsourcing email marketing may be the smarter and easier thing to do.

Outsourcing your email marketing efforts to agencies or individuals specialised in this field will make for a more targeted, effective and consistent campaign. Email marketing professionals will be able to create a selection of templates which incorporate your company branding. This will maintain your brand image and strengthen it in the minds of your customers. An addiditional benefit is that these templates including copy and visual imagery can be A/B tested with a sample of your defined audience to find the most effective communication styles suited to your consumers.

Outsourcing email marketing will also mean a content calendar will be set up and maintained meaning your customers will receive regular content at the most optimal times to ensure your messaging is well received. Another essential part of email marketing is analysing the data. Email marketing specialists will churn through this data for you to generate invaluable marketing insights into click-through rates, open rates and so on. This is vital in understanding your customers and will provide you with key takeaways and learns to ensure all your future email marketing campaigns are even better.

Creating Visual Content

Unless you are an amazing visual designer with an overwhelming amount of creativity and time, then we implore you to outsource your visual content design creations. Research has shown that visual content is key to any form of communication. Content or posts which include visual imagery produce up to 650% higher engagement than text-only posts. Furthermore, it has been found that individuals are 85% more likely to buy a product after viewing a product video.

Creating any visual content, such as website infographics, printed materials, videos or imagery, can be heavily time-consuming and by outsourcing to a designer you will be able to save so much money and effort in doing so. This is because the ability to create visual content which is aesthetically appealing, that suits your branding and conveys your target message is very hard to do if you donโ€™t have the necessary experience and skills required.

Hiring a professional designer will ensure that you have a consistent and coherent corporate image. Creating, but more importantly maintaining oneโ€™s corporate image is vital to any marketing strategy and will help to build upon your brand’s success. With popular well-known brands such as McDonald’s or Coca Cola, it doesnโ€™t take much to recall key parts of their brand like their logo. This should be the aim of any business as by keeping your brand at the very forefront of your consumerโ€™s mind it will build brand visibility and awareness helping to increase sales and profits.

Another top tip of ours is to try to not hire different freelancer designers for different projects. This will make it more difficult to ensure all your design outputs are consistent and meet your brand guidelines. Instead, opt to employ a designer or design agency who are an expert in the field and are able to handle a multitude of different things related to design and branding.

Responding to Comments

Nowadays more and more people are turning to social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram to express their opinions about brands. Research has found that 83% of people, particularly those in younger generations, expect brands to respond within 24 hours or less. This can be quite problematic to brands who may not have enough resources or capacity to adequately respond to their customerโ€™s comments. Furthermore, hiring and employing an internal Social Media and PR (Public Relations) response team can be quite time-consuming and training. Therefore, outsourcing this particular activity may be of great help.

The greatest advantage of outsourcing social media responses is definitely the potential cost-saving element. This way you won’t need to pay full-time employees salaries and/or benefits.

Similarly, having an external Social Media and PR response team will mean that they are skilled, experienced and have a good success rate. They also will be able to quickly and effectively respond to any potential comments which could harm your brandโ€™s reputation.

Identifying Guest Blogging Opportunities

As wonderful as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and link-building is in drawing customers over to your website, it can be such a long and time-consuming activity. Therefore, why not outsource this instead?

Guest posting, also known as guest blogging, is a fantastic way to not just build up your links but also raise your subscriber following, grow your customer base and build a relationship with your online audience. In addition to this, guest blogging is a great way to improve your search engine rank. As stated by Andrey Lipattsev in a Google Q&A video, links are one of the three top ranking factors used to determine an organisationโ€™s website ranking.

Guest blogging opportunities work by adding a link in your article back to your website. This link will act as a backlink and with more and more of these backlinks, it will make Google see how important your website is, thus improving your SEO scores.

Benefits of outsourcing this backlink strategy are that you will have more time to do something else, for example, admin duties or sourcing new clients. Furthermore, other potential advantages are increased visibility not just for Googleโ€™s search engine ranking purpose but across other popular blogs and websites too. Search engines are very favourable to websites which are constantly and frequently updated. Hubspot statistics show that companies which publish at least 15 blogs per month get five times more traffic than those that donโ€™t blog.

In addition to increased brand visibility and improved SEO scores, outsourcing potential guest blogging opportunities can also help you find a new customer base. For example, if you were to find and source guest blogging sites who have a similar target audience to your own, or operate in a market which you would like to pursue, then you will be able to reach even more potential prospects. This exposure to a new segment of potential customers will help to build your brand awareness and visibility, thus leading to increased website traffic, sales and conversions.

Social Media Posting

As previously discussed, social media is a powerful tool for brands to help them stay connected to, and develop a strong relationship with customers. One of the most unique aspects of social media is that it is a two-way form of communication – customers are encouraged to share, like, follow, comment and in general, interact with the brand. This provides brands with invaluable customer feedback which in turn will help improve their brand reputation.

Research findings have discovered that around 74% of consumers rely on social networks to guide purchase decisions. Moreover, 71% of consumers who have had a good social media service experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others. This demonstrates how important it is to maintain your social media presence.

Curating social media content is an important yet time-consuming task for any marketer, however, you donโ€™t need to be the one to do it. Instead of posting on Twitter or creating Instagram visuals you should be spending time running and growing your company.

Therefore, outsource this to an external party. Digital marketing agencies like The Good Marketer are proven to be effective in this area creating endless, engaging and effective content. Social media marketers will also ensure that the time of posting is optimised for your brandโ€™s audience. Social media analytic tools will also determine which posts are the most effective when the best time to post is, the best style of communication and so much more.

When outsourcing your social media activity, ensure you provide your marketer or agency with clear brand guidelines and example content or information you want to promote. This will help ensure you stick to your overall branding styles and core company values.

Reports

Producing client reports, data analytics reports, facebook reports and even heatmaps can be very time-consuming.

Reports are perfect for understanding how your marketing is performing but being able to understand all of the data they contain can be a little difficult therefore, it is best to outsource this to an expert who will be able to produce the report and explain the key factors to take note of.

Data can be displayed and presented in a manner of different ways, one being heatmaps. A heatmap is a two-dimensional representation of data in which values are represented by colours.This way of representing the data is perfect in making individuals realise the key trends and information. Nonetheless, there is a considerable cost of time and money in preparing these data reports, which could potentially limit a companyโ€™s financial and logistical ability to invest in new business ventures.

Furthermore, it can take a while for you to upskill your staff so that they are able to effectively capture all the key insights and market data required needed to strategise new opportunities. By outsourcing this activity, your company will benefit from an in-depth, systematic and efficient report containing all the need to know information without the hassle of doing it yourself.

Other key reporting efforts include Facebook Ads Manager reports. The Facebook Ads Manager allows you to drill down into each of your individual campaigns, ad sets, or ads, providing specific information on your audienceโ€™s demographics, behaviour traits etcetera.

Facebook Ads Manager can be a complex tool to use. Therefore, through outsourcing this activity to marketers or a specialised agency, you can benefit from their experience and knowledge to ensure your Facebook campaigns are optimised to your target audience.

 

 

About the author: 

Tom Welbourne is the Director & Founder of The Good Marketer, a Digital Marketing Agency in London which works with Small Businesses to drive more traffic, generate conversions and increase sales.

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About Lilach Bullock


Hi, Iโ€™m Lilach, a serial entrepreneur! Iโ€™ve spent the last 2 decades starting, building, running, and selling businesses in a range of niches. Iโ€™ve also used all that knowledge to help hundreds of business owners level up and scale their businesses beyond their beliefs and expectations.

Iโ€™ve written content for authority publications like Forbes, Huffington Post, Inc, Twitter, Social Media Examiner and 100โ€™s other publications and my proudest achievement, won a Global Women Champions Award for outstanding contributions and leadership in business.

My biggest passion is sharing knowledge and actionable information with other business owners. I created this website to share my favorite tools, resources, events, tips, and tricks with entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, small business owners, and startups. Digital marketing knowledge should be accessible to all, so browse through and feel free to get in touch if you canโ€™t find what youโ€™re looking for!

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