Handling all aspects of digital marketing internally can become challenging as companies grow. Strategically outsourcing digital marketing certain activities provides access to expert skills and flexibility.
Providing exceptional customer service is essential for business success, leading to improved customer satisfaction, loyalty and repeat purchases.
However, delivering consistent and quality support requires careful planning and execution of a robust customer service strategy.
By investing the effort upfront into architecting a thoughtful support framework tailored to your customers, you can elevate service standards across channels and ensure customer needs are fulfilled through prompt issue resolution and personalized care.
This article will explore when and how to outsource digital marketing effectively and highlight top outsourcing platforms.
What Does Outsource Digital Marketing Mean?
Outsourcing digital marketing involves delegating responsibility for all or parts of your online marketing efforts to an external specialist agency or freelancer rather than relying exclusively on in-house staff.
This strategic approach provides access to deep expertise across the spectrum of today’s essential digital channels – search engine optimization, pay-per-click ads, social media marketing, content creation, email campaigns and more.
Outsourced talent and agencies devote 100% of time and energy towards staying on top of the latest tactics and innovations in their particular focus areas.
Their contextual understanding of the nuances and ongoing shifts in search algorithms, platform guidelines and digital advertising ecosystems far outstrips what generalist marketers can grasp through fragmented effort.
By leveraging dedicated external digital marketing specialists, companies can benefit from expanded capabilities, improved efficiency through greater focus on high-value activities internally, and scale initiatives up or down as business needs evolve.
For startups and small businesses, outsourcing is often the most feasible way to establish an impactful online presence.
Why Should You Consider Outsourcing Your Digital Marketing?
There are a few compelling reasons businesses should consider outsourcing some or all digital marketing work:
Access Specialized Expertise
Outsourced digital marketing specialists devote 100% of time and energy to staying on the cutting edge of the latest tactics and technologies in their particular focus areas. Developing comparable in-house capability across SEO, PPC, email marketing and more can prove extremely costly.
Significant Cost Savings
Paying an outsourced digital marketing provider is notably more affordable than hiring similarly skilled in-house resources across different areas, plus associated management overhead. Outsourcing reduces heavy investment in operational infrastructure as well.
Focus Internal Resources on Core Business
Outsourcing digital marketing allows your sales and marketing teams to focus their efforts on high-value activities like lead generation, customer acquisition, expansion, and retention. Rather than getting bogged down trying to keep pace with digital channels, critical staff can devote energy to business growth priorities.
Scale Efforts to Meet Business Needs
The flexible, on-demand nature of outsourced digital marketing resources allows effort to scale up or down as per evolving business requirements. This agility and elasticity is difficult to match with full-time hires.
Gain a Fresh External Perspective
An experienced outsourced digital marketing provider can provide an objective external point-of-view on your website, campaigns etc. and share best practices that may offer new insights against inward-looking internal teams.
Benefits/Services of Outsource Digital Marketing
Outsourcing digital marketing provides several key advantages:
Access to Specialized Skills: Outsourced providers possess deep expertise across various digital marketing channels which is challenging for in-house teams to develop across the board.
Improved Efficiency: Outsourcing routine digital activities frees up internal resources to focus on core business functions.
Cost Savings: Paying an offshore freelancing team or agency is often more affordable than hiring full-time in-house staff, reducing operational costs.
Flexibility: Seasonal or short-term marketing needs can be addressed via outsourcing, adding or reducing capacity as required.
Advanced Tools & Technology: Outsourced teams utilize advanced digital tools and technologies difficult for small businesses to access independently.
Expanded Marketing Efforts: By leveraging external digital marketing talent, organizations can expand efforts across more channels and campaigns than resource constraints might otherwise allow.
Sectors of Outsource Digital Marketing
While outsourcing can involve handing off comprehensive digital marketing capabilities, typically specific areas are delegated across two broad buckets:
Specialized Marketing Services
- SEO – organic search optimization
- PPC – pay-per-click ads
- Programmatic Advertising
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
Marketing Operations
- Content Strategy and Creation
- Influencer Marketing
- Graphic Design
- Analytics and Reporting
- Marketing Technology Implementation
Determining which capabilities to outsource depends on internal resource constraints and strategic priorities. Core sales driving channels like SEO and PPC ads along with bandwidth intensive content creation are prime areas for outsourcing.
How to Outsource Digital Marketing
Effectively outsourcing your digital marketing encompasses several key steps:
Audit Your Existing Digital Marketing
Conducting a comprehensive audit of existing digital marketing efforts is the critical first step before potentially outsourcing capabilities. This involves thoroughly evaluating all current initiatives across owned platforms like your website, blog, social media channels and email campaigns.
Analyze the reach, engagement rates, conversions and return generated across each platform.
Compare paid advertising activities on channels like Google Ads, Facebook Ads etc. and resulting customer acquisition costs against industry benchmarks. Connect conversion data with CRM sources to track ROI.
Identify strengths, weaknesses and gaps across channel efforts. This data-driven assessment spotlights areas needing improvement and benchmarks progress if efforts are outsourced.
Determine Internal Resource Constraints
Analyzing internal resource constraints involves taking an objective look at the gaps within your current marketing team across core capabilities that may be negatively impacting performance.
This includes evaluating whether you have adequate and appropriately skilled staff to manage key digital marketing channels like SEO, PPC, email marketing etc.
Assess if your team has sufficient bandwidth for content creation across blogs, social media, videos etc. or if added support is needed. Review existing analytical skills to confirm if you have personnel capable of leveraging data, uncovering insights and tracking KPIs through digital analytics tools.
Finally, confirm if current marketing technology systems and tools like CRM, marketing automation etc. are robust enough or need enhancement.
Prioritize Digital Activities to Outsource
Determining which specific digital marketing activities to prioritize for outsourcing requires analyzing potential impact against budget and resource constraints.
Assess gaps revealed through your audit highlighting areas needing urgent elevation like website security, email deliverability etc. along with quick win opportunities.
For example, if SEO was flagged as underperforming due to limited in-house expertise, the high revenue impact from higher organic rankings makes it a prime function to outsource. Though analytics skills gaps may hamper insights, the impact may be less immediate than traffic-driving channels.
This filters options to identify the subset of outsourced digital marketing services with maximum benefit.
Research Outsourced Digital Marketing Firms
Researching and selecting the right outsourced digital marketing partner requires thoroughly evaluating prospective specialists or agencies to ensure optimal alignment with your business priorities and objectives.
Shortlist firms with demonstrated expertise in outsourcing digital marketing and success supporting companies in your specific industry to leverage contextual insights into effectively engaging your target audience.
Review case studies across required service areas like SEO, PPC, email marketing etc. to validate capabilities in elevating critical KPIs like lead generation and sales.
Examine project pricing models, account management processes, communication norms and reporting standards to gauge collaboration efficiency.
Confirm they utilize current digital tools and technologies to inform strategies.
Start with Short-Term Outsourced Projects
Embarking on full-scale outsourcing across all digital marketing off the bat carries risks if partners and processes are unproven from the outset. Hence, an effective approach is to first launch a few short-term, limited scope pilot initiatives with specialized outsourced providers in priority areas identified during assessment.
For example, handing off SEO auditing and recommendations or email campaign creation based on pre-approved templates. These bounded projects validate capabilities in executing specific activities and allow evaluating collaboration efficiency across factors like communication, transparency, and meeting timelines in outsourcing digital marketing.
After relationships and value delivery are established at a smaller scale, broader commitments spanning more marketing responsibilities can be progressively handed off.
Monitor and Optimize Efforts
To maximize value from outsourced digital marketing, closely monitor campaign performance against defined key performance indicators like lead volume, traffic growth and sales lift.
Setup analytics tracking and reporting cadences – whether daily, weekly or monthly – to continually measure metrics versus targets.
Maintain open, frequent communication channels with your outsourced provider to assess the latest data, gain their contextual recommendations on optimization opportunities and collaborate on improvement initiatives, particularly within the realm of outsourcing digital marketing.
This combination of disciplined tracking, transparent dialogue and shared commitment to analyze data and refine efforts drives greater productivity from outsourced relationships.
When to Outsource Digital Marketing
Common scenarios where outsourcing your digital marketing proves beneficial include:
Launching a Major New Product or Service Line: Getting a new product or service off the ground requires expanded digital marketing effort across numerous channels – SEO, PPC, email, social – along with monitoring and optimization. Outsourcing provides turnkey elevation on critical launch support.
Redesigning Your Website: A website redesign or replat forming project needs expanded SEO and analytics capabilities to redirect traffic, maintain rankings, align content etc. Outsourced specialists make managing this transition smooth and seamless.
Expanding into a New Geographic Market: Entering an unfamiliar regional market requires nuanced digital marketing expertise aligned to unique norms across SEO, social media marketing and more. Local outsourced providers have specialized understanding of differences.
Running Limited-Time Sales Campaigns: For short seasonal sales pushes – Cyber Week, Back-to-School – where extra marketing resources are temporarily required, outsourced support plugs these gaps cost-effectively.
Gaining External Perspective on Marketing Performance: Over time, internal teams can become myopic and too close to ongoing efforts. An outsourced audit assessing campaigns, tools, budgets etc. provides an unbiased perspective to refine strategy.
How to Find the Best Platform for Outsourcing Digital Marketing
Choosing the right outsourcing provider for your digital marketing requires careful vetting across a few key areas:
Industry Expertise – Seeking specialists with experience supporting companies in your specific industry or vertical ensures contextual grasp to craft targeted strategies and messaging nuances.
Services Portfolio Fit – Align provider service capabilities to your outsourcing needs – SEO, PPC, email marketing etc. Some focus specifically on select channels while larger firms offer integrated digital services.
Proven Case Studies – Review case studies and client examples that tangibly demonstrate positive ROI and KPI improvements across channels comparable to yours to validate capabilities.
Communication and Collaboration – Clearly convey expected response times, account management process, contacts and reporting to ensure seamless collaboration critical for outsourcing digital marketing success.
Cost – Evaluate project-based pricing, monthly retainers and full-time equivalent models across providers to identify options matching budget availability and value delivery.
Our Favourite Outsourcing Websites
Upwork
- Upwork is the world’s largest online freelancing platform, providing access to highly skilled independent talent and agencies to support virtually any digital marketing requirement.
- With over 12 million registered freelancers and 5 million clients, Upwork enables businesses to easily connect with specialized marketing experts in areas like SEO, PPC, email marketing, graphic design and more for both short and long-term projects.
- A rigorous screening process ensures professionals have validated skills and portfolio samples, while integrated collaboration tools facilitate seamless remote engagements.
- By leveraging Upwork’s immense pool of stringently vetted global talent spanning every facet of digital marketing, companies can effectively and affordably scale campaigns and capabilities.
Fiverr
- Fiverr is an online freelance services marketplace that provides easy access to a vast range of digital marketing experts and agencies.
- It features over 5 million skilled professionals offering fixed-price packages for discrete projects starting at just $5.
- Services span basic tasks like logo design, content creation and keyword research to comprehensive managed partnerships across SEO, paid ads, email marketing etc., making Fiverr a cost-effective means to execute specific digital activities.
- Its global talent pool, streamlined ordering and built-in collaboration tools facilitate easily engaging specialized marketing talent for one-off initiatives without commitments.
- This flexibility makes Fiverr useful for testing selective marketing capabilities or running short experimental campaigns to validate new strategies before larger investments.
HubStaff
- HubStaff is a software platform designed to facilitate managing and optimizing productivity of remote teams, including outsourced marketing freelancers and agencies.
- It provides integrated time tracking to capture effort across projects which feeds into automated scheduling and payment processing tailored to global talent.
- HubStaff’s centralized online dashboard gives visibility into remote worker activity levels through screenshots, activity metrics and GPS location tracking.
- By equipping managers real-time visibility into distributed team progress, easy means to rebalance workloads, streamlined systems to handle compensation and built-in communication channels, HubStaff enables seamlessly integrating external digital marketing resources into collaborative business workflows for maximum productivity.
Digiryte
- Digiryte is a digital consultancy providing on-demand access to a diverse pool of marketing experts across key specialties like PPC ads, SEO, email campaigns, web analytics and more.
- Rather than large retainers, they offer flexible support models to address specific needs whether one-off audits, campaign creation or ongoing optimization across channels. This allows instantly tapping niche digital specialists to elevate performance without the overhead of full-service agencies.
- Their team of over 500 marketing professionals spanning skills from technical analysts to creative strategists facilitates tackling discrete challenges across architecture, automation, analytics, attribution and acquisition.
- For resource constrained teams, Digiryte provides an easy plug-and-play way to benefit from specialized augmentation aligned to priorities.
Toptal
- Toptal has established itself as one of the most elite and exclusive talent networks by maintaining remarkably thorough screening culminating in an acceptance rate of just 3%.
- This intense vetting process spanning technical assessments, language tests, live skill evaluations and personality analysis aims to only onboard the top 3% of applicants per domain.
- This fixation on quality over quantity ensures Toptal provides access to an invite-only circle of exceptionally skilled individuals who demonstrate subject matter mastery and professionalism.
- Companies rely on Toptal knowing the rigor of their talent identification attracts best-in-class freelancers.
- For expert consultants, the network promises exposure to rewarding projects at reputed organizations.
- By severely limiting intake, Total has built prestige around exclusivity while ensuring remarkable capability.
FAQs
Q: What marketing tasks should stay in-house vs. outsource?
Strategic planning and decision making should stay in-house. Specialized execution can be outsourced. Analyze where you’ll get the most ROI.
Q: How much can outsourcing digital marketing save?
Savings vary based on provider rates but often 30% – 50%+ vs. hiring specialists full-time.
Q: How to ensure data security when outsourcing?
Require providers to sign NDAs. Avoid sharing sensitive customer data unnecessary for their scope.
Q: What are red flags to watch for?
Poor communication. Lack of experience. Vague deliverables. Inflexible payment terms. Lack of formal contract.
Q: When does outsourcing not make sense?
For core capabilities essential to your business model that require close management, in-house staff usually works better.
Conclusion
Outsourcing provides a flexible and cost-efficient way for modern businesses to execute effective outsourcing digital marketing and address evolving needs. From specialized support across areas like SEO and PPC to entire capability management, external talent and agencies enable small teams to affordably drive more online visibility.
By following best practices around strategic planning, provider selection, project governance and collaboration, outsourcing digital marketing can deliver significant competitive advantage.
The key is determining activities that make the most sense for outsourcing based on internal resource constraints, vetting providers carefully to find aligned partners and managing relationships closely through open communication and transparency.
Rather than a wholesale hand-off, the ideal approach is to integrate selective outsourcing across high-impact specialties, such as outsourcing digital marketing, into existing workflows. This balances external reach with retaining internal ownership over core strategic digital marketing oversight.
We hope that this guide has provided you with all the information you were looking for and if you still have any queries we are all ears to you, you just have to contact us in any way you feel comfortable. Thank you!