By Thea Millard
Marketing is the only business field that can connect the brand with the client. There are all kinds of marketing branches to take care of, though, like content, social media, newsletter, inbound, offline, viral, upsell, cross-selling and many others. Therefore, it is kind of difficult to ask one single team to divide their time between such diverse campaigns. If you are thinking to outsource your marketing efforts, but you are still in doubt, the following five signs will clear things up for you.
1. Your Marketing Staff Is Exhausted
There will never be a shortage of marketing tasks. There will always be new ideas, strategies, plans to find new leads, refine the website, engage consumers with the brand, and ultimately generate clients. This kind of activity requires commitment, ongoing efforts, creativity, and a dose of madness to kick the mind out of the box.
So, it is understandable why a team of marketing might get buried in too much workload. If the accumulated marketing efforts require more than 200 hours of work each week from four staff members, it is time to bring in more help.
Another way to figure it out is to ask them personally how they are doing with their time management. If the 90% stress comes from overworking, then you should lift some responsibilities off their shoulders and outsource them. This way, your marketing team will have more time to come up with creativeand engaging strategies.
2. Skipping Important Marketing Steps
To create one marketing campaign, it requires from one to nine months. That would be the ideal scenario. However, in reality, one marketing team deals with several campaigns at the same time. And to fast-forward things, even more, they have only one month at their disposal to create, run, and finish them.
However, there are many new tools, such as Hootsuite or HubSpot, and inside tips and tricks the staff uses to skip some steps. But the alarm signal should go off when the team bypasses important marketing steps. These can be brainstorms for coming up with original campaigns, market research, consultation of previous campaign results, execution of each stage of the marketing plan or creating reports based on the campaign outcomes.
These are the five essential phases of a marketing campaign. Ignoring one or several of them can lead to negative things like compromising the brand reputation, making a move that is bound to fail or repeating an unsuccessful campaign. To avoid all these, you can hire help and have time to organize your marketing efforts properly.
3. Lack of Visual Content
Indeed, marketing is about creating relations, engaging content, successful social posts, and many other things, but it becomes more powerful with imagery by its side.
There are many tools and platforms out there that can provide you with visual resources that can be even free, such as Pixabay, Canva, and Pexels. However, nothing compares with the expertise of a professional graphic designer. Such a person can set your brand apart and create a different, more powerful face of your business. This face can promote ideas of authority, community, security and other things that persuade the consumer to trust your product.
A professional graphic designer can build you a new logo, website, social posts, newsletter templates, and other materials that respect the current trends. So, when your imagery starts to resemble your competition’s, it is time to outsource it to the right person. Looks do matter.
4. You Can’t Penetrate New Channels
It takes experience in order to understand a new advertising platform and speak its language. If you are going on Snapchat and address its audience with business terminology, you will waste precious marketing efforts.
There are many cool technologies, concepts, and sites on the web or outside of it where your brand can meet a tremendous number of leads, like Found.ly, LeadGenius or Unbounce. It is important to make your brand visible so that all interested consumers can be aware and access more information about your product or service. If your marketing team doesn’t have the time or doesn’t record great success with other channels, it is a good sign that you need to outsource. Many good agencies specialize in lots of advertising channels that are popular today.
5. Business Numbers Have Stagnated
There’s no security in the online world to the extent that even Facebook’s monopoly is threatened by a generation that is not interested in social media. So, all businesses can meet an overnight success or the opposite.
When no strategy works to pump up the work, maybe you need a new perspective to help you get out of this difficult situation. When you can’t find a tree in a forest, it is time to call for someone to help you. Outsourced help specialized in your field will come with a fresh mindset and can even pinpoint the one thing that triggered this plateau effect.
All in all, these are the five signs that will let you know that you need to outsource your marketing efforts. The beauty of it is that you can refuse their services if you are not content with the results. So, any agency or a freelancer will have your best interest at heart.
