What Does Outsourcing Your Marketing Even Look Like?

The definition of outsourcing is “the practice of obtaining goods and services from a foreign supplier.” Sounds a little odd...especially in terms of marketing. Outsourcing has a sort of negative stigma around it that many small to medium-sized companies are constantly battling. Many business owners think that everything should be done in-house with employees they already know and can train. They often worry that outsourcing is very expensive and not as personable. In reality, though, outsourcing your marketing efforts can lead to huge growth and success.

The first question that a business needs to consider is how much money they are willing to spend on marketing. Many experts will recommend the 5% rule: spend around 5% of your gross revenue on marketing if you are making less than five million a year in sales. With this money, the business needs to decide if they are going to hire a team of individuals to run everything in-house, have the owner or manager run everything (if they are a small business, this is usually what happens), do nothing and just rely on word-of-mouth marketing, or outsource to an agency. At the end of the day, hiring just a couple people to run everything for you will probably result in outsourcing of some kind for certain types of marketing efforts anyway, a full team of qualified marketers is very expensive, and doing nothing in today’s age is simply not really an option. Outsourcing marketing can be a viable and beneficial opportunity for any business.

There are a plethora of different options once you start considering outsourcing to an agency. You can hire advertising agencies, social media management agencies, videographers, photographers, bloggers, PR agencies, and more. However, it is best to look for agencies that do the most of what your brand is looking for. A lot of advertising agencies, for example, do just that. They advertise. They might not shoot any of the content they need for their advertisements, so then you may be looking at outsourcing your photography as well. If the business doesn’t do videography with their photography, then there’s another agency you will need to find. By this time, you have three or more different businesses trying to piece together one or two advertisements, which can be extremely overwhelming and expensive. Social media managers can do the same thing. They might be great at creating posting schedules and coming up with captions, but they often don’t shoot the actual content.

Your best bet for outsourcing is to find an agency that does everything you need at a certain monthly cost. Our agency (and many others) operate like so. Your company pays a certain amount for the projects you are interested in maintaining each month. Let’s say your company needs 1-2 minutes of edited video footage each month distributed across social media, two photoshoots a month for different product launches, a social media manager to run a posting schedule and engagement levels, you would like three blog posts a month, and you want to consider redesigning your website. This is where outsourcing to a full-service marketing agency is a great decision for your business. As great as it may seem to hire employees, or ask already paid employees, to do these things, it really is not practical and will not give you the best results.

After you determine which projects you need each month, the next steps are crucial. If you are going through our agency, we would set up a time to meet with you to understand your needs and goals. We create a plan that is custom to you and set a price that is affordable and fair to be paid on a monthly basis. That’s it. There are no hidden fees, there are no games. You tell us how much you want and we provide that for you each month. If you want photoshoots, we set up days and times to gather content. If you are looking for a social media manager, we talk to you about how often you want to post and we create a posting schedule. Our team becomes merely an extension of your own employees. We strive to know the business and your mission as much, or more, than you do. We make it a priority to be in constant contact with you to offer new ideas or thoughts about what we think would work best for your brand. A member of our team is readily available if you have a blog post you just thought about or a post that wasn’t originally planned. Vivid is literally your in-house marketing team at a fraction of the cost.

Outsourcing can seem like a scary thought when you plague it as being a foreign company that knows nothing about your brand and is only looking to make you spend more money. With Vivid, though, we care about your dreams and goals and will work tirelessly to ensure they come to life. We will work with your company day in and day out to be reliable, efficient, and effective. So, the next time you are thinking about outsourcing to an agency, think about Vivid.