Outsourcing Digital Process: Is it Right for Your Business?
What is the most valuable commodity to a business owner?
You might be surprised, many business owners do not know the answer. They’ll tell you it’s business assets, sales, profit.
They’re all wrong. These are important but nothing more important than TIME!
You can make more money, but you can’t make more time!
For small and medium business owners, time is even more valuable. There’s not enough hours in a day to run a business and to network to get the job done.
Running every aspect of business – from marketing, finance, and day-to-day operations – is hard to do all on your own.
Sometimes, you have the manpower, but it isn’t enough. You need to have the right people to back you up.
The High Cost of Hiring In-House Staff
Hiring an assistant or a team of individuals can be one of your options. They will be responsible for each business process, so everything is streamlined and running smoothly.
This option can be costly though, especially if you’re starting out with your business.
In fact, you need to offer them a competitive wage and some exceptional benefits before you can get the right people onboard.
What is the most effective strategy to cut business costs?
Businesses turn to digital marketing firms to help them accomplish several of their online marketing processes. Some of these tasks include following:
- Content Creation
- Keyword Research
- Social Media Marketing
- Web Development
- Website Creation and Maintenance
In their bid to save time and money, they often consult business management experts who can help them improve their business processes. You can find these experts within the ranks of digital consulting and marketing firms.
Some of them even own an online marketing company, since consulting is one of their main services. These companies can also provide teams of skilled professionals who can handle several of the online marketing processes I’ve mentioned above.
Common Digital Processes that Business Owners Can Outsource
There are several business processes that can be passed on to digital marketing companies. These firms can help you with your online marketing campaign, so you can focus on other areas of your business. Some of these processes include the following:
1. SEO-Related Services
Search engine optimization is a task that you can’t do in a day.
It is time-consuming and requires expertise and knowledge of the field. It’s broad, and most of the time – unpredictable.
A foundation of an excellent SEO campaign is a good keyword research.
There are tools to make it easier like Google Keyword planner or paid tools like Moz, but analysing thousands (if not millions) of keywords also takes time.
Aside from keyword research, SEO experts regularly update their knowledge to cope up with the latest algorithm updates from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. They also analyse results using analytics tools, so they can come up with a more result-oriented campaign next time.
If you are going to put people who do not have expertise in this area, it’s a waste of time and resources. The right people including strategic planning and implementation is a must for any digital marketing campaign to succeed.
Content Creation and Marketing
This is another important process to businesses with websites. When you want to engage your target audience and acquire the much needed leads for your business, it’s essential to have quality content on your site.
Having quality content on your site can give you the following advantages:
- You gain more credibility with the search engines
- The content get shared and distributed on other relevant websites, hence you get organic links
- It can gather considerable amount of traffic to your site
- Your visitors are more likely to convert into paying customers, since you have something valuable on your site.
Creating your own content is not a mundane task. An engaging and informative post also requires in-depth research and sometimes, time. Take note that content is not only limited to articles, but video/digital storytelling and infographics.
A better solution is to delegate this task to third-party content writers, graphics designers and video editors. A good example for digital storytelling is Sparkol – a whiteboard video creation tool that can take your story to the next level.
It’s a simple tool to work on, but if you’re not yet confident on creating your own videos, then you can simply let a digital marketing firm do this for you. You only need to collaborate with them, especially during the story/plot creation phase.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a process that will focus on efforts to create valuable content that can effectively attract and encourage followers through various social networks. Just like content marketing, this task can be delegated to online marketing teams.
There are several social media tasks like:
- Regular updates of social media accounts
- Creating social media calendar
- Publishing quality content
- Answering comments and feedback
- Scouring social networking sites for relevant content that can be posted on your own company page
Since this process will require regular updates of social media accounts, it will take much of your time.
There are 10 social media management tools that you can use for these particular tasks:
Web Development, Site Management and App Creation
Site creation and management is another essential process for any type of business these days. Oftentimes, you need to create landing pages, tweak your email capture form or simply update the look of your website.
For this purpose, you seek the help of a web developer, or if you have the coding skills – you can do it yourself. But then again, it can be tedious work that you can simply outsource.
In addition, the popularity of mobile devices has paved the way for marketing apps to enter the digital marketing arena. Creating an app for your business is an intricate process that digital marketing firms can easily do for you.
Overall, outsourcing business processes is a flexible and strategic way of doing business. It’s a trend that every business owner should be aware of. Most importantly, it’s the best way to save your resources.
If you want to know more about outsourcing, maintaining an effective website, and gathering leads for your business, you can speak to James first and book in a free 30 minute strategy session.
You can also download our FREE Ebook The Growth Engine to know the exact strategy we are using to grow our clients’ business.