Learn how to use outsourcing marketing services to help boost your sales and reduce costs.

Outsourcing marketing services can help a startup to an enterprise company by improving web traffic, leads, sales lead conversion, higher sales close rates, and more.

Outsourcing marketing services can be a huge advantage for startups, small businesses, and enterprise business units. Outsourcing in marketing has become extremely popular with private equity, startups, and small businesses.

It’s simple. The net cost is 20-30% less cost and you should be getting professional expertise and typically see sales results quicker.

Before you begin your marketing plans and decide on the why what and when of outsourcing marketing services you must understand how many leads you need to fill your sales pipeline and sales.

A typical marketing leader will cost a company between $162,000 to $298,000 unburdened. What if you could get a complete marketing department with a senior executive on your team?

Are you trying to jump-start your growth engine by creating new demand, rebuilding opportunity pipelines, and re-engaging with customers? 

Begin with your internal metrics and reports to see where you might need help.

What are your conversion ratios? How many leads do you need? Use this marketing leads calculator to help.

The article will cover the following:

• Benefits of outsourcing marketing services
• Outsourcing marketing for small business
• Digital marketing outsourcing companies
• Outsourced marketing packages to improve cash-flow
• Why outsourced marketing departments save money
• Outsourcing marketing examples

What are outsourcing marketing services?

The practice of outsourcing in marketing is having certain job functions done outside a company instead of having an in-house department or employee handle them; marketing functions and tasks can be outsourced to a marketing agency. Marketing outsourcing has become a significant trend in startups and small businesses.

There are many outsourcing marketing companies so be sure they provide you with what you need.

Let’s face a few facts. Finding, training, and retaining talent with digital skills to make a difference can be different. Inbound Marketing for Lead Generation is nothing new, but HubSpot added the term to our marketing vocabulary.

There are not many people that know how inbound marketing works let alone add a technology platform like Marketo, Pardot, or HubSpot. So many of our clients have turned to us for marketing outsourcing services.

Modern digital marketers, like this Denver Digital Marketing Agency, must have a clear understanding of how their actions impact their organizational goals.

Outsourcing marketing services can offer so many benefits but the partner must be agile.

Small and midmarket businesses use outsourcing marketing services like:

• Outsourcing social media marketing
• Outsourcing internet marketing
• Outsourcing email marketing
• Outsourcing marketing research
• Outsourcing SEO needs
• Outsourcing website design
• Outsourcing digital marketing services
• Outsourcing content marketing

They should be expected to expand their digital knowledge and capabilities, manage increasingly complex technology integrations, and create strategies and campaigns that have a positive ROI.

Digital Marketing Agency, like an outsourcing marketing agency use hybrid digital professionals that excels in emerging core marketing principles like analytics, automation, content marketing, SEO, email marketing, mobile, in social media marketing. But that is just the digital part.

We started about a year ago in a hyper-competitive SEO market. Here’s what happened in a year.

We started with a full communication audit and market research to centerline the client. Once the data and KPIs were set we could begin testing for sales response.

After that, we got to work with activation and lead generation campaigns all supported with blog content and a strong pillar (cornerstone content) to boost web traffic by over 350%. How did you do?

Why did this web traffic change, first Google rolled out a major search algorithm change that rewards the best content and sees what happened?

How would you like to see your content reach higher limits? You can do it too. Learn how to create an SEO strategy yourself.

There is a significant overlay of marketing strategy that happens on top of digital. This could be a multi-channel or omnichannel marketing approach.

You must develop your mission and values. Add these to your branding and design. Next up, your communication architecture, how to target customer buys, customer-centric research, and psychology like our archetypes to create a business outcome.

And there is the question. Next, do we use a multichannel strategy or an omnichannel strategy?

I don’t want to insult any intelligence here. But I’m going to ask, do you know the difference between multichannel and omnichannel strategies? You know if you don’t, that’s okay because I didn’t know what it was 20 years ago either.

You will want to seek a hybrid marketing agency like Matrix Marketing Group. These new digital marketing agencies are beginning to rule the marketing world.

These marketing firms are tech-savvy, offer integrated digital marketing services and marketing plans, hire and train top talent, understand social media and social selling, and drive more sales with highly tuned marketing programs.

Boards, CEOs, CMO and investors are starting to ponder could I get better marketing results if I partnered with a marketing agency? Yes, outsourcing marketing services can be up and running in a week or two.

But, how do you know when it’s time to stop doing it yourself (or delegating it to an overworked support person)? Here are eight ways you know it’s time.

Maybe you want results like this for your SEO and website (see screenshot below). The long-tail word is ranked number one out of 55,300,000 possible web pages. What if your buyer’s intent words (head terms) and long-tail keywords.

You must create a demand waterfall to understand your marketing and sales funnel.

Do you know what words (AKA keywords) you are ranking for? What are your top-performing web pages?

When was the last time you calculated your sales and marketing ROI? Let’s do it now.

Here are eight ways you know it’s time to hire a marketing agency:

• Sales are Stagnant
• It’s Not Getting Done
• You Don’t Enjoy Marketing
• You’ve Realized You Don’t Have the Skills
• The Sales Department is Complaining of No Good Leads?
• Your Marketing Results are Hit or Miss
• You Wonder What is Working
• You’d Love to Hire a Complete Marketing Team, but Lack the Budget

11 benefits of hiring a marketing agency

1. Increased Revenue. When you have a marketing agency on your team, it will be able to increase your revenue by helping you come up with more innovative ways of going to market.
2. Shared Experience. A marketing agency will have the experience and knowledge needed to help your company grow.
3. Knowledge of Marketing Channels – The marketing channels that are being used for your business will depend on which industry you are in and what is being sold or marketed. A marketing agency is going to learn about these things very quickly and know a lot about how to use them for your benefit.
4. Improved SEO Rankings. Once SEO rankings on a site start improving, this can lead to more traffic on that site as well as increased sales. The reason for this is that the more people visit a site, the higher the chances are that they will be interested in what it is being sold or marketed online and then buy it.
5. More Customer Conversions. Sales will go up once customers feel like they have been given enough information about products and services to make an informed decision.
6. Reduction in Advertising Costs. A good marketing agency will be able to help reduce advertising costs by coming up with creative and more effective ways of advertising products or services.
7. Increased Brand Awareness. When brand awareness goes up, it usually leads to an increase in sales because people are now aware of what it is being offered and may be more likely to buy it.
8. Improved Web Traffic. This is achieved by the marketing agency increasing the visibility of your website through different online channels as well as improving the ranking of your site on search engines.
9. Creation of Comprehensive Marketing Plans. Having a comprehensive marketing plan in place is crucial for any business wanting to succeed. A marketing agency can help create this for your business and also help to execute it.
10. Development of Sales funnels. In order to be successful, a business needs to have a good marketing strategy in place. A marketing agency will develop this for your company and make sure that it is effective and achievable.
11. Reduction in Time Spent on Marketing. This is achieved by having a team in place that is dedicated to monitoring the different marketing channels used for your company.    

Measuring a Successful Marketing Strategy

Do you want to increase sales? Do you want to control your marketing cost?

In today’s unpredictable economy, companies are trying to find new and innovative ways to keep the marketing momentum going and growing, while dealing with budget cutbacks and dramatic fluctuations in the market.

Smart companies know that they can’t stop their marketing activities especially if they plan on establishing long-term value in their business.

So, where do they turn when marketing is necessary, but resources, expertise, focus, and funds are scarce? They find the answer to outsourcing marketing services. Companies can realize the following benefits of outsourcing marketing services:

• 15 – 25% of sales revenue gains
• 25 – 35% decrease in salaries plus overhead costs
• 10 – 25% decrease in overall marketing spending
• Access expertise in marketing strategy and implementation, as well as creative design, focused on the specific job or project at hand
• Get an outside perspective on your business
• Minimize the impact of marketing staff reductions
• Draw on outside experience with  what works and doesn’t work in scenarios
• Maintain the momentum with critical projects they’ll never fall by the wayside, drop down the priority list, or become forgotten
• Hire only whenever and wherever you need resources on demand.

Introduction to Marketing Services and Outsourcing

What is the Status of Outsourced Marketing Services

In today’s business climate, CEOs, boards, and management teams are cautiously optimistic about the economy and their company’s future growth.

They realize they still need to market to drive profitable growth and increase their company’s value, but the financial strings are being tightened. So they want to know their return. Who wouldn’t? Do you know the math?

Most people believe that keeping everything internal will lead to greater efficiency.

There is a definite growing trend, however, for companies, regardless of size or industry, to outsource (which used to be referred to as subcontracting) this is just another element of their business.

Outsourcing is not a fad, but clearly, a paradigm shift that can change a business model for the better by using resources outside the organization to perform specific tasks.

This increase is largely driven by just how easy it has become to find companies and people with specialized skills.

Technology and the Internet have made it efficient to search out people to do the tasks you struggle to do yourself. Sharing materials has become almost instantaneous as well as cloud computing and web conferencing.

The nice thing for both the marketing agency and client, it that they do not have to be in the same city or country. I would with folks all over the world, and some countries I’ve never visited.

If you farm out marketing work like graphic design on brochures or signs for your company, you can see proofs as soon as they’re ready.

It’s also very easy to pay for these services online with credit cards and PayPal. Harvard Business School professors Gail J. McGovern and John Quelch documented the trend in an article in Harvard Business Review.

One reason behind the move? While company marketing departments have plenty of talented right-brain, creative types, they may lack the left-brain analytics needed to better understand their customers in today’s information-rich environment. Or maybe it’s the opposite.

Companies often forget to ask the basic question: What business are we in? Too often the need to perform various functions and to keep a business running does not allow management to step back and ask this question. The answer should bring management to the fundamental product or service that generates revenue for the company.

In his book, Living on the Fault Line (HarperCollins, 2000), Geoffrey Moore said, all employees should be focused on core activities that are, things that contribute to a company’s competitive advantage and increase shareholder value. The opposite of core is the context: activities that do not contribute to competitive advantage. Context activities should be outsourced.

For example, your marketing director was hired to develop and coordinate strategies, tactical implementation, and generate more sales leads, all while maximizing the loyalty and profitability of current customers. That’s a heavy workload.

That is the head of the marketing’s core function. However, over time they have developed a talent for public relations and, as a result, have become the firm’s communication manager too. Those responsibilities (PR manager, Web guru) can be described as context.

Most companies handle context functions with respect to positioning, messaging, and public relations by allowing them to fall to the marketing department. The problem with context is that it often takes on a life of its own and begins to obscure what the core should be.

What management needs to consider is the effect that context tasks have on productivity, return-on-sales, ROI, and the general operation of the business.

Outsourced marketing services can help any company with worker overload, fresh ideas, new strategies, marketing technology, and more.

Outsourcing marketing services allow businesses to focus on funds and control headcount, allowing a company to hand over responsibility for an outsourced function within clearly defined management guidelines and then monitor future performance. Service-based marketing takes a hybrid digital marketing agency.

When you break down the costs of a full marketing department internally, versus the cost of outsourcing marketing services with an external partner, the business case becomes clear.

In a real-world example, a company can see a 15 – 25% revenue improvement in the first year, and a 25 – 45% cost savings are immediate. Other benefits that make this a compelling case to look at are:

• Lower cost
• Instant Availability
• Talent and experience
• External Objectivity
• Agile Flexibility
• Speed

The trend in marketing outsourcing does not look like it will slow down anytime soon given the stalled pace of hiring in this hot economy. Talent is scarce.

What is the Value of Marketing Outsourced Services?

1. Access expertise in marketing strategy and implementation, as well as creative design. An in-house team may not have developed the skills you need. Outsourcing marketing services to an experienced team that integrates seamlessly into your infrastructure will infuse your organization with new energies and ideas. You’ll introduce new and innovative marketing and sales approaches to your customers and business partners. And they are focused only on these disciplines.
2. Get an outside perspective on your business. Sometimes you can get too close to your business and not see your marketing strategies, programs, or materials from your audience’s perspective. Even though you may know your business inside and out by living and breathing it each day, your perspective is still one-sided. To market successfully to your current audience and capture new markets, you need to step out of your shoes and into your target markets or customers. Having a group outside supporting your needs helps give you the customer’s perspective, not just your company’s.
3. Minimize the impact of marketing staff reductions. It would help if you continued with projects, but your resources are limited. By outsourcing, you can find qualified, experienced resources that can come in and support your marketing needs so that the effort, money, and energy you’ve already invested do not go to waste.
4. Use outside experience with what works and doesn’t work scenarios. Whether it’s planning, copyrighting, or designing, the right marketing outsourcing team will have had experience with various marketing and communication strategies, techniques, and tools. You can rely on their lessons over the years to find the correct solution for your business challenge.
5. Maintain the momentum with critical projects they’ll never fall by the wayside, drop down the priority list, or become forgotten. Today, people change jobs or are hit with layoffs while in the middle of projects. When those people leave the company, they will most likely take the project assets with them (in the form of tribal knowledge). When you outsource marketing relationships, you have one centralized team as your partner, and your knowledge assets remain protected and archived for future use.
6. Hire only whenever and wherever you need resources (on-demand). Hiring full-time staff can be very costly when you add up wages, insurance coverage, office equipment and supply needs, training costs, etc. Don’t forget to add to the calculation the cost of a bad hire. The commonly referenced cost of a bad hire is 2.5 times the annual salary. In most small to mid-sized organizations, marketing can be outsourced while they focus on the core. Finding an outsourcing partner allows you the flexibility to bring on talented experts exactly when and where you need them. And you don’t have to manage or train the entire team. The outsourced digital marketing agency does that while you focus on the daily needs of running your own business and generating revenue!
7. Cost reductions: Not only does outsourcing save money on salaries and overhead, but the outsourcing partner can also save the company money in direct purchases on marketing programs as well (e.g., printing, media buys, advertising, etc.). A good outsourcing partner can manage to save a company anywhere from 10 to 25% in their overall marketing spending by leveraging their supplier.
8. A company can achieve a 25 to 35% decrease in salaries and overhead costs immediately. The base salary paid to employees does not represent the total cost to the company. There is the cost of benefits such as FICA, insurance, workers’ compensation, pension plans, and profit-sharing plans. Many marketing employees also enjoy incentive and bonus plans. Employers must also pay employees for holidays, vacations, and sick days.

This is accomplished in the following ways:

• Rigorously manage the input costs of marketing through strategic sourcing.
• Focus spending on the largest bottleneck in the sales cycle and leverage the brand’s most distinctive drivers to remove them.
• Maximize returns across the portfolio of marketing investment by adding focused analytics rigor to often-unfocused budget debates.

Typically, there are ten paid holidays each year and a minimum of two weeks of vacation.

There are also costs associated with hiring staff, such as job posting and advertising, resume reviews, and interviewing expenses. When you outsource your marketing functions, you pay only for the work performed.

Results and Benefits That Can be Achieved with Marketing Outsourcing Services?

Outsourcing marketing allows companies to focus their resources and control their headcount. This form of operations allows the company to hand over full responsibility for the outsourced function within clearly defined management guidelines and then monitor the performance.

Your marketing agency should be able to deliver what you need. For example marketing services like marketing research, SEO, SEM, content marketing, website redesign, and design, sales funnels, landing pages, CTA, graphic design, technology, analytics, and reporting.

When you break down the costs of a full marketing department internally, versus the cost of outsourcing with an external partner, the business case begins to tip in favor of not allowing the Context to conceal the Core.

The following elements would be common to build out a high-quality and stable relationship in a typical small organization with gross sales revenues of $20 million.

Description	Annual Salaries & Overhead	Outsourced Cost
VP, Marketing	$145,000	NC
Marketing Web Director	$128,500	NC
Marketing Content	$77,750	NC
MARCOM Coordinator	$59,500	NC
Outsourcing Fees	NA	$100,000
Total Annual Cost:	$437,500	$120,000 (avg est.)

SOURCE: TCG Salary Guide

That’s a $292,500 savings.

Think about what you could do with that.

Remember it’s a good idea to have a least one person responsible for marketing in the organization. I used the VP, Marketing. I keep his or her salary in the organization.

The table illustrates the realized cost savings of 51.57 percent with Outsourcing Marketing Services. Consider the example of a high-performance marketing partner that offers you results, flexibility, and a reduction in staff and overhead.

Companies can typically have equal if not better results while maintaining product and service quality for a fraction of the cost by turning to an expert in sales and marketing. And what is the cost of a bad hire?

The commonly referenced cost of a bad hire is 2.5 times the annual salary. In most small to mid-sized organizations, marketing can be outsourced while they focus on the core.

Cost is the most popular reason for outsourcing. You get an entire team of experts, a proven system, and regular accountability all for less than the price of hiring one employee.

However, strategic reasons such as improving the company’s focus on core business and improving quality are next. On the revenue side, with a professional outsourcing company, you can see anywhere from 15 – 25% sales revenue gains with Outsourcing Marketing Services.

The marketing partner you choose, for Outsourcing Marketing Services, is important and should have a blend of business acumen, sales and marketing know-how, and creative insights.

The team should be able to put together a holistic marketing strategy that will allow them to coordinate a complete solution to drive profitable growth for you quickly.

By carefully synchronizing strategies and coordinating tactics and their use, you and your marketing outsourcing services partner can create high-impact campaigns that generate more new customers, while maximizing the loyalty and profitability of existing ones.

Listed below are just some of the key benefits:

• 15 – 25% of sales revenue gains
• 25 – 35% reduction in salaries plus overhead costs
• 10 – 25% cost savings in overall marketing spending in programs
• Improve the return on marketing investment
• Increase profitable growth

Evaluation Process for Outsourcing Marketing Services

Step 1 (Internal Assessment): The first step is to determine what exactly you need. Evaluate your current staff for specific skills and experience in marketing and communications.

If there are select staff members who possess such skills, review their current role on the team to determine if they can take on other responsibilities without overwhelming them or placing them on unfamiliar grounds. Here is a list of questions to evaluate your internal team.

• What were their previous jobs and roles in other companies prior to being employed with you? You may be surprised to find out what hidden skills and passions your associates have that can be used to support your objectives and needs.
• Do they have a formal education in marketing and/or communications?
• Who typically offers innovative ideas for marketing the company and selling your product and/or service offering? Who helps you to think proactively?
• For those that may possess marketing and/or communication skills:
• What is their current role in the company and how much time do they spend on key tasks based on their present responsibilities?
• Do they have extra time to dedicate to the marketing efforts?
• Are they even interested in pursuing this opportunity?
• Does their current role relate in any way to marketing and communications activities for the department and/or the entire company?
  Do they have any creative or design experience?
• What writing skills do they possess? If they do a lot of writing for the company in the form of collateral, proposals, RFPs, internal communications, etc., evaluate those pieces to see what quality and communication skills they have. Do you have a content marketing plan?
• Are there good communication and working relationships between marketing and sales?
• Are sales forecasting and marketing potential measurements soundly carried out?

Wrap Up on Outsourcing Marketing Services

This paper shows how leading organizations use marketing outsourcing services as a business strategy, to gain a competitive advantage, and grow profitably. Listed below are just some of the key benefits.

• 15 – 25% of sales revenue gains
• 35 – 60 % reduction in salaries plus overhead costs
• 10 -25% cost savings in overall marketing spending
• Improve the return on marketing investment
• Increase profitable growth

The degree of these results will increase over the next 12 – 18 months as:

• More organizations seek ways to improve sales and reduce costs
• More companies adopt marketing outsourcing services
• Organizations focus on what they do best

Matrix Marketing Group focuses on business results and best practices that are currently taking place today and in the future. We see the following trends occurring in your industry:

• Part or all of the marketing activities being outsourced, Outsourcing Marketing Services can increase your marketing ROI dramatically.
• Companies will increase the use of marketing outsourcing as a means for a business strategy to improve business results and manage their cost structures effectively

Matrix Marketing Group provides marketing outsourced services, specifically designed to help organizations identify specific actions to initiate or improve their sales and marketing efforts.

To find out more please call us at +1-303-351-1645.

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