Outsourcing Pros and Cons: Should You Hire Someone For Your Marketing?

Entrepreneurship is a fulfilling but challenging lifestyle. There are many areas of operations that you need to manage  for a business to be successful. One thing sure is the need for attracting customers using marketing. A business cannot exist without customers.  In this post we will discuss outsourcing pros and cons for your marketing in an effort to help you understand whether you should outsource your marketing or hire someone in-house for the responsibility. 

What is outsourcing?

Outsourcing is the act of hiring someone outside of your company for help. Many business owners outsource for help in areas like I.T. and Marketing so they can focus on running the business while other freelancers or companies take care of other important areas of the business that are needed to operate successfully. 

What does an outsourced marketer do?

There are many ways a marketing freelancer or marketing company can help a business.

• Graphic Design for branding (business cards, posters, pamphlets, website images, etc.)
• Social Media Management – frequent online posts to help your company engage with customers online. Media consumption behavior is changing. While in the past more people spent time watching TV, more and more people are spending time on online using mobile devices and computers. 
• Online Advertising – Creating advertising campaigns on digital platforms like Google, Youtube, Instagram, and Facebook. Online advertising requires you to invest some money. You pay the online platform and then your advertising campaign will be showed to an audience. This is a great option because it allows you to reach people outside of your current follower base. You can target people based on detailed information like location, gender, interests, etc. 

Pros 

Time to focus on priorities

Business owners get too involved in trying to run everything. While this is required in the earlier stages, it can be detrimental as your business grows and the needs of the business changes. Outsourcing Marketing can help entrepreneurs to focus on other areas that require the limited time you have. Many entrepreneurs are concerned about an other expense. The expense is worth investing in if your Marketer can provide guaranteed results for the money invested. Your goal as a business owner is to measure performance and not always be in the trenches. A marketer should be able to provide you with key metrics to display how much business they are bringing you.

Leverage expertise and creativity

Unless you are running a marketing agency, you are not an expert marketer. Hiring someone who specializes in marketing can provide you with a lot of insight. You could try to do your own marketing but no matter how much time you invest, you will not be able to be as good as someone running the operations for you. Hiring someone will allow you to learn about new ways to market your business online. This insight will give you a creative perspective that can help inspire work for other areas of your business. 

Cons

Unqualified help

There are many marketers who claim to be great but may not be qualified to take on your marketing. Make sure you know what your objective is. Do you want more leads? Do you want brand awareness? Do you want people talking about your services? Make sure you are clear with what you want and ask for a case study with specific examples of how they helped another client achieve their goals. 

Another operating cost

Hiring someone will add another expense for your business. While it is the responsibility of the marketer to be able to share exactly how they are working towards your expectations, you as a business owner need to be patient. Marketing campaigns can require time and sometimes multiple phases to get the results you need. Your goal is to ensure you are marketing more than how much you put in. Take sometime to calculate your return on ad spend. Which is how much you make for every dollar you spend on marketing.