Flexibility and agility // no hard feelings
Given that the urgency of marketing naturally ebbs and flows, it’s a huge benefit if your marketing expenses can appear and disappear from your payroll in tandem with your business activity.
When you hire an internal marketing resource, you add a new year-round, immovable salary onto your payroll. But when you bring on an external marketing team, you have full control over the cost. You can throttle your team’s hours up and down, or even “turn off” your marketing based on your need, for seasonality purposes, or for any other reason – all without any hard feelings. In contrast, “turning off” your marketing resource when you’ve hired an internal employee is a much more difficult conversation, and it hurts team morale.
An outsourced team also gives you the freedom to explore new approaches without making long-term commitments – if you want to try a new tactic or strategy, you can increase the size of your team or even mix it up to match the required skill sets to the specific project needs. You can move in another direction at any time, giving you unparalleled agility to react to the quickly changing market and take advantage of opportunities as they arise.
Results-driven by necessity // quantifiable success
Because an outsourced team doesn’t have the cushion of a long-term contract, it must consistently prove its worth. This pressure is standard for external teams, and they have reliable processes in place to provide regular updates to clients. Through executive summaries, marketing dashboards, key performance indicators, and lead generation updates, an external team will communicate results, learnings, and next steps, keeping them accountable and your staff fully aware of progress.
This embracing of quantification into the core of the marketing process does much more than keep your staff updated. By incorporating measurement and metrics into the heart of the marketing program, outsourced marketing teams establish an infrastructure to monitor and maximize ROI in real time. By making it quantifiably clear what strategies are and are not working, this interactive feedback loop ensures that an optimal mix of solutions and channels is fully in place.
An outside perspective // cross-industry knowledge
You may think that because an external team is not as familiar with the intricacies and nuances of your offering and/or industry, it is in a less favorable position to market it well. But, sometimes, the opposite is true. Outsourcing your marketing effort just may be the most effective way to gain honest, objective perspective on your company’s branding and messaging from a consumer’s vantage point.
Successful marketing must shape the company’s image in the eyes of consumers, and it can be difficult for in-house employees to divorce themselves from company politics and groupthink and put themselves in the place of a prospective consumer. A company’s conception of its brand is certainly important, but, ultimately, it is prospective consumers’ opinions that determine the success of a business.