Warning! You’ll like what you’re going to read 🙂
Experts say that is no better way to get leads than to ask for them. So here I am, not just asking, but giving you eleven undeniable reasons why you should outsource online marketing for your company.
If you’re an eCommerce business, by the end, if not sooner, of this article, you will wonder why (and maybe smack yourself on the head) you haven’t outsourced your online marketing this whole time.
Don’t worry. I am going to give you plenty of reasons (11 to be exact) to outsource your marketing; whether it’s pay-per-click, social media advertising, website design, email marketing, or SEO.
Every ad agency wants your business, and we at Fullmoon are no different. We want to continue our growth, preferably with you.
Why do you think you see so many articles written about outsourcing that originates from the outsource source itself.
Self-serving? You are 100% correct. Marketing agencies are geniuses at identifying pain points, addressing them, and offering solutions.
11 Reasons to Outsource Online Marketing Activities
- 1. Saving time the right way through proper allocation.
- 2. Growth faster than your competition with the right strategy.
- 3. Stop worrying about hiring the right people
- 4. Launch campaigns quicker without unwarranted delay
- 5. More resources to focus on your brand strategy
- 6. Complete control of the terms of your engagement
- 7. Save money and generate higher returns
- 8. You’re not an expert in digital marketing
- 9. Fresh ideas and new perspective from people who are not attached to your business
- 10. Networking and career opportunities might present itself in turbulent times
- 11. Technology access to an array of marketing software
That’s why you see so many articles written about outsourcing that originates from the outsource source itself.
Derek, you mean it’s not altruistic? Let’s get real. When was the last time you saw an article written about outsourcing by a marketing firm that doesn’t encourage outsourcing?
OK, now that the air is cleared, let’s dive in.
Yes, you can build your own home
Recently, I read an article on outsourcing. The opening line asked if you were to build your house, would you do it yourself?
Let’s talk about something different for a while and pretend this article is not about the reasons why you should outsource online marketing for your business…
…we’re going to talk about building a house.
First, we live in the best time in our lives to do anything we want to if we invested the time into learning it. Somethings are harder than others, but many are possible.
The author of that article must have missed the news about this mom and her children building their 3,500 square foot home – by themselves!
While the majority of you will hire an architect and contractor (you know, the experts), there’s something to be said about the individuals who are not afraid to get their hands dirty and take the challenge head on. Right?
So whether you’re marketing your own business or building a new house, fact is you can do it all by yourself.
It will take a lot longer than hiring a professional, but you’ll get it done eventually. Whether you have the time to dedicate to do it well and to your liking, like the family above, is up for debate.
It’s funny when I talk to business owners, they usually say one of two things when we discuss how they can outsource online marketing and what it come do for their business.
Either they have tried dabbling in their own Google Ads or Facebook advertising campaign at least once and failed
or
they have no clue where to even start creating a PPC campaign.
A big reason why so many small to medium size businesses are not advertising in search engines like Google and social media is because they get overwhelmed by the buffet of options for setting up Google Ads or Facebook Ads.
You need to grow your business online. But reality is, there’s a lot that go into launching a campaign, managing, and optimizing performance to make sure you’re getting a good return on your advertising dollars.
Even Google realizes the importance to reduce the friction for smaller sized businesses to launch campaigns on Google that they launched a lighter version of Google Ads, called Google Adwords Express.
You still serve your ads in Google’s search engine, but without the bells and whistles. This is where many differences exist when you try to manage it yourself instead of looking to outsource online marketing for your ecommerce business.
So far, there’s no compelling reason to outsource your marketing. Because there’s abundant resources for anyone to learn how to launch a Google Ads campaign.
Over the years, I’ve talked to several business owners who have done a great job with their own Google Ads. And some are even more in tune with their Facebook Ads than some social marketers I know. We are living in a world where we have unprecedented access to knowledge. The rest is just executing it and learning.
So let’s recap.
It is possible to run your own marketing campaigns:
- If you know what you’re doing,
- If you have the patience to keep up with industry changes,
- You don’t mind getting your hands dirty,
- If you have the time to create your own images and ad copy, and
- If you can handle your analytics and reporting.
And that’s just scratching the surface.
I remember when I got my oil changed a few months ago. My friend asked why I didn’t
For those of you who are busy running your business and need some help with your marketing to outpace your competition, make more money, and grow your company — Fullmoon is here.
Interesting Reasons to Outsource Your Digital Marketing
1. Are you really saving time?
“You’ll save more time,” is a feel-good statement. As part of your sales process, without fail, agencies sales people tell you if you outsource your marketing, you will save time, have more time to focus on growing your business. While that is true long term, it’s a common blanket misconception. It’s quite the opposite — at least it should be the opposite. Why?
Any agency worth their salt will want to spend time with you to learn everything about your customers, your products or services, and your business. As a matter of fact, your agency partner should demand time from your busy schedule to have regular calls to discuss strategy.
On my first call with any prospect, I like to get an understanding of their expectation by outsourcing their marketing. I want to get a sense of their level of commitment to the success of working with our team, or are they expecting to just drop everything on our lap and expect magic to happen.
Before you hand over the keys to the kingdom, you need to make sure that your outsourced agency can see the forest for the trees. Your outsourced agency will save you time, but it’s not from writing fewer blog posts. As a matter of fact some business owners love to write. It’s not about just casting a wide net of ads across search platforms.
It’s about the ability to laser focus your audience reach to maximize your ROI. That’s where your time is saved. Because you don’t know where to look.
What agencies should communicate is that by outsourcing your marketing, you are shifting and reallocating your time to discuss creative marketing strategies, and letting your agency execute (this is the most time consuming).
When I was running lead generation for LegalZoom many years ago, we outsourced our online marketing to an agency. They built our landing pages, created ad copy, improved conversions, and delivered reports. But the co-founder was not necessarily saving time. He was extremely involved in the entire lead generation process; but entire focused on strategy. By having the extended agency team, Brian had time to get creative with marketing ideas.
So let’s debunk the myth of time-saving here. It’s more about time reallocation.
2. You’ll grow faster than your competitor, maybe!
If you lined up 5 digital agencies and asked them the same question.
“What can you do for my business?”
They will most likely say that they can grow your business to outpace your competition. That makes choosing the right agency to outsource your marketing more challenging than figuring out what’s for dinner at home.
But there’s no such thing as the perfect advertising agency. This is yet another blanket statement that agencies throw around when prospecting. I get it. I find myself using it in sales pitch occasionally.
At Fullmoon, when we on-board new clients, we ask very specific questions about their business. As you can see, this is the information that we use to create a strategy that can help our client grow over their competition. Right?
But to grow and out-pace your competition requires more than just digital marketing.
Outsourcing your marketing will not automatically grow your business. I know it sounds obvious, now that I spelled it out. I am surprised how many businesses I talk to that tell me their previous ad agency promised them the sky and failed to deliver.
Your business’ growth is not entirely dependent on who you outsource your marketing to. It’s not set-it-and-forget-it.
You must work closely with your outsourced marketing agency to make things work in harmony. If you expect to offload your marketing responsibility entirely to your agency, you’re going to be in for a bumpy ride.
Setting the record straight. Growth is driven by integrating your outsource marketing team into your company.
3. You don’t have to worry about hiring (or building a village)
This is 100% true.
Let me state the obvious. With outsourcing, there are no benefits to provide, payroll taxes to pay, or vacations to honor—there’s also no risk of turnover if the marketing is outsourced.
One of the main reasons businesses outsource their marketing to Fullmoon Digital is because of resources. It’s tedious and cost prohibitive to build an in-house marketing team to cover all the channels of customer acquisition.
Finding the right person to lead your marketing team can take many weeks or months. And you may not be able to afford their salary; the good ones are expensive.
But let’s say you are able to hire someone. What happens after that?
If you expect your new marketing director or vice president to be hands-on, create your marketing strategy, build your advertising campaigns, manage reporting and analytics, AND deliver results — then you’re going to be in for a wake up call. It’s easier said than done.
Having a team of marketing specialists monitoring, managing, and optimizing your campaigns gives you peace of mind.
Marketing is not difficult. But it requires a village to make it work. And unfortunately, many businesses are not ready to build a village. And that’s why you outsource your marketing.
4. You will go-to-market quicker
We live in a world where speed and precision can make or break a marketing campaign.
Launch a campaign one day late and you could be missing out of tens of thousands of dollars in online sales.
How often are campaigns delayed because you got the wrong image dimensions, or your ad copy wasn’t up to snuff, or you couldn’t figure out why your ads are not serving in Google search? It happens more often that you’d think.
Because of our work as an ad agency, we hear many stories about how in-house marketing team missing deadlines because they get pulled into so many directions and new priorities clog their inbox before they get to finish their previous tasks.
Using Asana, we are able to coordinate projects and keep our clients informed of progress to launch campaigns on time.
Project management software like Asana, Trello, Basecamp, or something else is a no-brainer to supercharge efficiency.
Your outsource marketing team will make sure campaigns are ready to launch in time. It does give your business the assurance that there’s another team looking out for your best interest when you have your hands full with 50 other things to do.
Speed and coordination is everything in marketing. A few hours of delay will cost your business a lot.
5. Your brand needs your undivided attention
If you are running marketing in your organization, then brand building is probably one of your key responsibility. And if it’s not, it should be.
So, there is no doubt that you’re already keeping up with industry changes, marketing updates, and everything else on a daily basis.
I have read many articles and I abhor the fact that they make you sound like an uninformed marketer or business owner, we’re not going to do that here. Because we know that if you outsource your marketing to Fullmoon Digital, you’re doing it because you need extra resources, and not because you’re uneducated.
Your only have so many hours in a day. Your time needs to be invested in building your brand in order to grow your business. While marketing is part of the brand strategy, it’s one component that will require a lot of time to plan, build, execute, analyze, and report. And it also happens to be the one component that is easy to outsource.
Your outsource marketing team should be in the front lines; your boots on the ground.
Brand building requires your full attention. Outsourcing your marketing can strengthen your brand strategy.
6. You are in total control of the terms
Ad agencies hate this part because it holds them accountable.
When you outsource your marketing, you are in absolute control of the situation. That’s because you can hire and fire your marketing agency due to performance. Even if you were locked into a contract, as the client, you will have a good reason to terminate if your business is not seeing results and growth.
Your outsourced copywriter delivering the quality you need? — cancel the contract and hire a new copywriter.
Your social media expert isn’t generating the engagement and revenue for your social ads? — hire a new one.
In all Fullmoon’s contracts, for example, we have a 30-day termination clause that protects our clients in the event they need to cancel for whatever reason.
Outsourced marketing is a transaction between two willing parties — you and your agency. If you feel like you’re not getting your money’s worth, you can terminate the contract at any time.
Now, there are agencies that try to be sneaky with this.
I’ll explain.
Some agencies will require them to create your new Google Ads account. It makes it really convenient for you because they might even go as far as paying for your ads and bill you and the end of the month. Basically, you pay $0 out of pocket to start advertising and getting your sales and leads.
So, let me recap. See if you can catch on to this nefarious scheme.
- Your outsource agency created your Google Ads account under their login.
- They use their credit card to pay for your ads.
- You have no control over your data.
Avoid this at all costs. If your outsource marketing agency ever requires you to let them create your campaigns under their account, hang up the phone. I’m serious.
Why?
Because, at some point, if you want to leave, they will hold all your data hostage. And Google won’t be able to do squat about it! That’s when you lose your control.
Be aware of outsourced marketing agencies that want to own your advertising accounts.
7. You are saving a lot of money, let’s be honest
No fluff. You will save money by outsourcing your marketing. That’s a known fact. What you get from an outsourced marketing agency will be exponentially more than what you can afford to buy or build internally. And even if you can, it may not be the best move.
I have helped many clients build internal marketing teams over the years. And for some businesses, it make sense, at some point to bring marketing in-house. But not before they stabilize their core business activities.
Lulus.com was my client many years ago. When I first started working with Colleen and her mom, they still ran a brick-and-mortar store in Chico, CA. At that time, there is no way lulus.com could have built an internal digital marketing team. There was a huge knowledge gap and it would have been financial disaster.
As a result, I worked on their SEO and paid marketing strategies for a few years until their eCommerce site was growing steadily. It reached a point where both sides agreed that an internal marketing team made sense for their next phase of the business. The amount of money saved by not building a marketing team right away was one of the best decisions the Lulus.com owners made — and they’ll tell you the same thing!
Ever since they’ve grown so much.
8. You are not an expert in marketing
That’s OK. You don’t have to be.
Most successful business owners are experts at building their brand. And they partner with a team who is amazing at marketing their brand.
It’s funny when I talk to new clients, they think online marketing is just about writing ad copy or bidding on keywords.
Not at all.
An effective marketing campaign has many moving parts. From building audience segments and tracking website performance to optimizing PPC ads and improving social media profiles, a complete marketing plan requires all those moving parts to work in harmony. And your outsourced marketing agency can put all those together for you to align with your business goals.
Much like the mechanic who’s an expert at fixing your car, marketing agencies are experts at growing your business — they can accomplish in one day what might have taken you an entire week or longer to figure out.
9. Thinking outside the box; fresh ideas
I’ve never met someone who doesn’t like new marketing ideas.
I was speaking to one of our clients recently, and we were brainstorming new ideas to acquire more customers, which lead me to write this huge list new customer acquisition ideas.
A big benefit of marketing agencies is that they are exposed to a plethora of clients and tactics that work for them. When you work with your outsourced marketing team, you can tap into their wealth of knowledge and draw from it to test it for your business.
That inside information is worth its weight in gold.
10. You might find an amazing career, true story!
This might sound weird, since we’re an ad agency and want your business! But this story is so amazing I have to include it in this list.
It’s about my friend Chris Innes, who’s now the COO at SteelHouse.
Chris was on the client-side and used Steelhouse as their outsourced agency for display retargeting marketing many years ago. From my conversations with Chris, he worked so well with the Steelhouse account team and wanted to move – and the stars aligned for him.
Sometimes, when you outsource your marketing to an agency, you end up opening doors for yourself. I’m not advocating you leave your organization to work for someone else, but we live in a world where employees are constantly looking for growth opportunities.
He started his career at Steelhouse and the rest was history.
11. You get access to technology
Marketing technology in itself is affordable. Some are even free like Hubspot’s CRM tool.
There are countless marketing technologies and software in the market that can inundate you. Even marketers have a hard time picking which tools to use sometimes.
But you don’t have to worry about this when you outsource your marketing. Your agency team will help you figure out the best technology and marketing software to help your organization grow. Plus they will have access to more marketing software that you will ever care to learn how to use.
More common reasons (in fancier terms):
- Reducing and controlling operating costs
- Improving company focus
- Gaining access to world-class capabilities
- Freeing internal resources for other purposes
- Streamlining or increasing efficiency for time-consuming functions
- Maximizing use of external resources
- Sharing risks with a partner company
Conclusion
When it comes to the growth of your business, outsourcing can be a thing of beauty. It allows you to focus your time and energy on your brand rather than developing a laundry-list of secondary skills to support the various needs of your business.
So, if you want to be more successful in your business, invest your time in what you know and pass the rest to an expert.
