According to a recent survey, the number one reason for outsourcing in 2022 was cost reduction.
The rapid economic contraction, post-pandemic, and the looming recession that looks worse than expected have meant that revenue teams are scrambling to cut costs.
However, as we gleaned from past recessions, we can’t stop marketing. In fact, those companies who keep marketing and advertising during a recession see up to a 256% increase in sales.
Those companies who battened down the hatches saw 0% growth.
Truth is, a recession is a buyer’s market. This goes for advertising spend too. With fewer companies vying for ads, your business is in a much stronger position to outstrip the competition. Now is not just a good time to outsource your marketing, from a financial point of view, it’s historically going to be a stronger positioning tactic for your revenue team post-recession.
But what about building an in-house marketing team? Or if you have an in-house team, why switch it up and outsource? Financially, it makes sense to outsource your marketing. The reason most businesses balk at the idea is an underlying insecurity about control, or lack thereof.
Financially, it makes little sense to hire in-house right now. As for the control aspect, well, a good agency is seamless. With modern technology such as Google Meet, Slack and Zoom, there’s no reason for an external agency to feel any less part of your overall team.
The average salary for a Head Of Marketing is roughly $138,073 or £73,376 in London. That’s the cost of a small house in the state of Georgia, just to get the ball rolling. But that’s just the head of the department. Who’s going to do all the actual “marketing”?
You’ll need a:
- Digital Marketing Manager: $133,757 or £46,459
- Digital Marketing Coordinator: $128,750 or £38,969
- Content Strategist: $66,668 or £46,950
- Copywriter: $69,000 or £42,000
- Social Media Manager: $55,117 or £33,426
- SEO/SEM Specialist: $75,864 or £43067
And that’s just the minimum staff required next you’ll need systems and facilities to help them do their job.
The cost of building an in-house team can be prohibitive when the money is better spent on creating sales and awareness right out of the gate with an external agency.
A marketing agency is a done-for-you, turnkey solution. It comes right out of the box, ready to do what counts, marketing. Plus, the budget is set when you engage them. You don’t need to worry about unforeseen costs, the sticker price is the price you pay.
How Much Is Your Time Worth?
When a person starts a business, they quickly figure out how much an hour of their time is worth. Lunch is on UberEats, the lawn is cut by a guy around the corner and Amazon 1-click becomes your best friend. You’re optimizing everything you can to save time. However, it’s not a shock to find the average start-up entrepreneur doing more than they should inside the business.
From marketing to accounts, human resources and raising funding, it's too much. If it’s too much now, imagine how it’ll be when you scale up. If you’re busy researching email marketing, social media, content marketing and everything else you have to do, what time can you spend doing other tasks? Creating a workable, effective marketing strategy takes time. That’s time you don’t have right now.
The Skills Gap Is Real
Almost every sector has a skills gap; this includes marketing. Many internal marketing departments have internal skills gaps. The only solution is to hire more staff or train existing staff, both options cost money.
By hiring an external agency, you cut expenditure on skills gap training. The burden is placed on the agency.
The Constantly Moving Target
As we all know, tech moves fast. This is also true for marketing technology. Digital marketing is moving at a rapid pace to keep up with the demands of the ecosphere. More spaces to market digitally equals more technology required to market in those spaces.
Agencies keep on top of these technological trends because they serve multiple clients who require them. They have access to the latest:
- Search engine marketing tools, such as SEM Rush or Google Ads
- Keyword research tools like MOZ or Wordstream
- Reporting tools, analytics and dashboards
- Email marketing tools like Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and Active Campaign
- Social media marketing tools such as Buffer, Hootsuite and Sumo
An agency will subscribe to these technologies at an enterprise level, meaning the cost is spread between multiple clients. If you want the benefit of these tools in-house, you must absorb the entire cost of a subscription and train your staff to use them.
But Aren’t Those Tools Free?
Most of the above tools have a freemium model, yes. You get to taste the software for a while or for a certain limit. Mailchimp, for instance, allows you 2000 free email subscribers before they charge you. But the outcomes are limited, most of the powerful features are greyed out, and your results will be negligible.
The only way to access the powerful tools behind the dashboard of some of the most useful marketing tools around is to pay the full price. SEM Rush can cost upwards of $500/£400 for a full enterprise-level subscription. Once you add a few more tools and the cost of training your staff to the specialist level, it can cost thousands just to get access to the tools required to market your business.
A Bigger Picture
When you engage an external agency, you get an unbiased perspective. Teams within teams are biased for many reasons. It’s easy for internal marketing teams to get favourable treatment until lacklustre results force management to confront them, but how long until that happens? Perhaps management favours the team members; maybe proximity generates complacency?
Being closer to the business doesn’t always generate the best result. Internal teams have suffered customer blindness for years; they’re still marketing the way customers bought a decade ago sometimes. Not to mention that failures create timidity among internal employees, and the reluctance to speak up when things aren’t working is a genuine phenomenon.
Avoid Burnout
A whopping 52% of staff are suffering burnout right now, post-COVID. This worrying trend also applies to marketing teams. Dwindling productivity means you’ll have to either hire more staff or get existing staff to fill the void. Does your CFO have time to do keyword research? Probably not.
By outsourcing your marketing to an agency, you sidestep this problem entirely. The agency has multiple staff to fill the role if an employee must take a leave of absence or just quits altogether. Either way, the work gets done seamlessly, without any notable change on your end.
In Closing:
As you’ve guessed by now, hiring an external marketing agency can save time and money, and since time is money, it saves money on both accounts. Your revenue team is constantly looking for ways to cut costs in places where excess has become the norm.
Outsourcing your marketing to a trusted advisor, a team built specifically to market your business in the best possible light, that’s money worth saving.
Not just now but in the foreseeable future.
