It’s no secret that B2B marketing best practices across different marketing channels (social media, paid advertising, website optimization, lead nurturing email campaigns, etc.) are changing every day. Rather than divert time and money trying to learn the necessary tools and techniques, many companies are outsourcing these tasks.
Generally speaking, outsourced marketing is the engagement of a professional marketing firm to serve as your own firm’s marketing department.
Outsourced marketing lightens the load for company owners and busy managers who are already wearing too many hats within their organizations. Not everyone has the time, resources, marketing savvy or copywriting/design chops to handle marketing on their own – so outsourcing to an agency is sometimes the perfect solution!
How Does Outsourced Marketing Differ from Working with an Ad Agency?
Because so many people use the terms “marketing” and “advertising” interchangeably, you might think outsourced marketing isn’t anything new. After all, ad agencies have been around since the 1800’s.
But outsourced marketing is different in some very key ways—and most of them benefit small or mid-sized businesses like yours.
First, marketing is more than simply promoting your business.
When you enlist the help of a good marketing agency, you aren’t just looking for jingles and taglines. Marketing agencies can research your target demographics, understand their online habits, and better align your company’s online presence with those habits. Marketing agencies can help you educate and “nurture” prospective clients—a strategy that modern consumers prefer over hard-sell tactics and tired rhetoric. Outsourced marketing lets you meet and engage prospects at many different stages of their buy cycle.
Another difference: marketing agencies are generally better handholders than ad agencies.
At Sharp Media, for example, we don’t drop the work on your doorstep—leaving you to figure out where it goes and how to get it there.The implementation side of what we do is just as important as the researching, writing, and designing. Even beyond execution, we’ll help you test and measure the results of a marketing campaign, so you have a clear idea what’s working—and what you’re paying for.
Types of Organizations That Benefit Most
Outsourced marketing is a particularly good investment for organizations that don’t employ a large, in-house marketing team. You might have a few people (or zero people) dedicated to your website, your email list, your newsletter, your social media strategy—i.e. all those big items you keep avoiding. Understandably, you don’t want the overhead that comes with hiring a fulltime web developer, designer, copywriter, SEO or PPC consultant, etc.
Most marketing agencies have all those experts on staff. You only pay for what you need, when you need it. And since you don’t need major redesigns every month, you can save a lot of money—without skimping on quality.
In a nutshell, the types of organizations that benefit most from outsourcing tend to be small to mid-sized, privately held organizations where:
- The owner has been coordinating or executing his/her own marketing.
- There is little to no in-house marketing staff or department.
- The VP of Sales is dually serving as VP of Marketing.
- The in-house marketing manager is swamped with an assortment of tasks – and they’re struggling to keep pace with the ever-growing list.