For many businesses, outsourcing has become an important part of their digital marketing strategy.

You might think that I am biased here, but truly believe the right digital agency can make a huge improvement when measuring the return on marketing investment made in digital.

You’re able to tap into the skills, experience and perspectives of a collection of digital professionals all passionate in delivering on your marketing objectives.

1. Access The Skills You Need

Building an in-house team to take care of the entirety of your digital marketing efforts is a practical impossibility for many businesses. 

The skills your company needs are either hard to come by or too expensive. What’s more, it won’t be financially feasible to hire someone for a full or even part-time placement if you don’t need their skills constantly and consistently.

The campaigns that you run will change at different times of the year

The campaigns that you run will change at different times of the year – for example, branding and SEO at the start of the year, more focus on social media and paid advertising towards Christmas and sales periods.

A digital marketing agency will retain employees in a range of different roles and can apply the right mix of skills to meet your campaign objectives.

This happens seamlessly for you, with the knowledge they have built up about your brand objectives shared throughout your campaign team.

2. Manage Your Budget More Effectively

Outsourced digital agencies are typically responsible for the marketing spend that your company places with Google, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Tracking this spends across multiple platforms and campaigns is difficult and time consuming.

Tracking this spends across multiple platforms and campaigns is difficult and time consuming.

Add to that the requirement to track conversions, carry out optimisation and direct budget to the most effective campaigns, and you have a complex set of reporting and management requirements.

Digital agencies are experts in effectively managing your digital marketing budget, having developed tools and processes over 100s of clients to make the process more efficient.

By working with an agency, you benefit from their internal controls and procedures. You set the budget and expectations, they handle the rest.

3. Gain New Perspectives

An all in-house team is inherently limited in the experiences that they have.

They are in somewhat of an echo chamber, exposed to the industry and products that you are trying to promote and the techniques used to promote them.

Digital agencies work with a wide variety of industries, business types and marketing professionals. They get to learn about and develop innovative, successful marketing techniques and apply them to different sectors of the business community.

Their employees are also required to meet continued professional development requirements – for example, Google Premier Partners (like CBO) require their employees to complete annual training on all of Google’s advertising suite.

You are able to tap into this insight and expertise in an extremely effective and targeted way when you partner with an agency.

4. Meet Deadlines, On Time!

With a solid marketing strategy in place, your business cannot afford to have a single point of failure, one which might occur with an in-house team. 

A typical agency will have multiple redundancies in place. Whether that is multi-person teams working on your campaigns, software and automation solutions or versatile employees that can support each other, they are able to give more certainty that campaigns and objectives are delivered on time.

For example, here at CBO we have over 50 employees with product specialists for SEO, PPC, social media, design, website development and custom software builds. We also have a full support team ready to respond to on-demand requests.

A digital agency can also help you in your planning and development stages so that you can get the media, copy and campaign briefs ready early enough that campaigns can be executed smoothly and

5. Give Your Business Space To Grow

Scalability is a key advantage of outsourcing.

As your business grows (whether that is through more physical locations, more orders, more traffic to your site or more social engagement), your operations need to change to react.

A large business cannot be run as a small business and the growing pains of transitioning from one to the other are real and painful.

A digital agency can respond to the changing needs of your business and likely has experience dealing with the issues that you are trying to resolve.

Once again, they can apply the expertise, insights and software solutions developed with other customers to help you through the growth stage of your business.

Your internal marketing, sales and operations resources are then free to focus their efforts elsewhere – more store openings, employee engagement and training, operational efficiencies etc.

Final Words

For most businesses today, outsourcing digital marketing makes sense on many levels, not least because of the flexibility and affordability it presents. 

While it may take some time to find the most appropriate agency for your specific needs, the minimal financial commitment (as opposed to recruiting a full-marketing employee or department) definitely makes it worth exploring as an alternative.