Time is of the essence for businesses, especially for startups and small businesses. Small business owners juggle their time and attention between management, operations and marketing — necessary efforts that give them a boost in their competitive industries.
Marketing — specifically digital marketing — is one of the most difficult aspects of scaling your business, especially if you don’t have experience in the strategic and tactical aspects of digital marketing. Reading a blog or two about paid advertising or content marketing isn’t enough to bolster your brand’s digital success.
Marketing can easily become a full-time job. Combine that with the operations and sales part of your business, you’ll need someone else to do the job. But should you outsource all tasks, like blog writing? Or are there specific digital marketing tasks that you can outsource?
Digital Marketing Tasks You Can Outsource
Banners and Images Creation
If you are not a designer, avoid creating images and banners for social media posts, ads, etc. This is activity can waste your time, as well as impact your business if the images do not accurately represent your business. In some cases, business owners have someone in the team do the banners. If they aren’t designers, they spend time on mediocre work instead of doing something more productive.
Don’t risk it. Instead, outsource your images.
When you outsource images and banner creation, design their workload. A good mix of tasks could be:
- One image for Facebook ads per week
- One to two images for social media posts per week
- One banner in different dimensions for Google Ads
Google AdWords
AdWords is crucial for businesses that want to be found on Google and other major search engines. From international enterprises to local businesses, visibility on the search results offers a steady stream of leads. But how can you outsource a technical task?
First, get a referral from another business that is similar to yours and has worked with a trusted AdWords specialist. Check out the referred company’s website and make sure AdWords is part of their core services, not a side service.
The best outsourced companies are experienced in the following:
- Ad creation
- Keyword research
- Bidding
They must also be capable of creating a list of relevant keywords for your business. Once they have the keywords, have them run it by you and eliminate the ones you think are not relevant.
Content Writing
Quality content, whether it’s a newsletter, a blog or website content, remains an effective way of ranking in the search results, as well as driving more traffic to your website.
Fortunately, there are many content writers you can outsource online. The majority of them have relevant experience in delivering high-quality content for your business.
Digital Marketing Tasks You Shouldn’t Outsource
First, avoid outsourcing your overall digital marketing strategy. Instead, hire a marketing consultant to work with you in developing a strategy, but it should be clear that someone else would do the implementation. This ensures an unbiased consultation.
Second, outsourcing Facebook ads is also tricky. It takes a lot of expertise and time to make your ads profitable. You may need someone in your team to manage the freelancer or the outsourcing agency. When your team grows, outsource the FB ads content writing and image creation and have your employees handle the tracking, targeting and optimization.
Finally, avoid outsourcing SEO. It’s difficult to gauge what a freelancer can do to achieve the “best” results. If their strategy ends up in you getting a penalty, you may ruin your chances of ranking well in the search results. It’s best to focus on Adwords instead.
The Bottom Line
Outsourcing some tasks keeps your marketing department running. Instead of having one employee try to do everything or hiring a specialized, full-time employee, list down tasks you can outsource and look for an outsourcing company you can trust.
