Your Ultimate Marketing Team Might Be Outside Your Office

When it comes to marketing, should you outsource select services – or your entire team?

It depends on a few factors. But many Australian businesses with under 100 employees are benefiting massively from the flexibility, expertise and ultimately the results associated with fully outsourced marketing.

Why outsource your entire marketing function?

10 compelling reasons below.

1. Marketing is a unique skill in itself.

You’re damn good at what you do, but marketing requires an entirely different skillset. Expecting to do both is like asking an Airbus A380 pilot to perform a root canal: unlikely to end well. When you outsource, you can focus on running your business, making sales, improving products, training and improving your team’s performance the way you do best.

2. You can’t read the label from inside the bottle.

You may well be standing too close to your offering to see its unique selling points and where it stands in the wider market. Marketing at its core is about the market, not the company being marketed. Having an outsider’s perspective, together with a detailed knowledge of your offering, allows us to make decisions in your best interest with clarity.

3. You’ll get depth of expertise in every discipline.

If you’re running a 1000+ person company you can probably afford to hire 25 experts in different core areas such as design, content, paid search, data analytics and so on. You could even have multiple staff in each area to ensure continuity and quality if someone leaves. But most smaller companies don’t have this luxury – and instead, you can end up with a patchy team that doesn’t cover all the skills you need. The solution: outsource.

4. Our diverse experience is your diverse experience.

The only learnings your in-housing marketing team gets once they start with you are those from your own account. At an agency, team members learn from working on various accounts and from team members working on other accounts.

We might have 10-15 similar campaigns to yours running at any one time and get incredible learnings from these, which we can then apply to your campaigns. Our partnerships with Google, Facebook and HubSpot are also key in ensuring up-to-date industry knowledge.

5. You enjoy an agility that you won’t get in-house.

A change in the competitor landscape, offering or audience can require massive shifts in how marketing work needs to be structured (hello, COVID-19).

With an entirely outsourced marketing function, there’s no need to re-train or fire members of your team and recruit for those new skills. As an agency with deep resources across many channels, we can reallocate resources as needed to suit what you require.

6. You pay only for what you need.

If you hire a CMO in your smaller business, you might only need them for 20 hours a week. Your SEO tech might only be needed for five. Even if you’re able to hire staff with high competence in certain areas, it’s likely that as a small business your utilisation will be massively skewed. Outsourcing your marketing to a truly full-service agency means you get 100% utilisation and the right blend of expertise at the right ratios.

 You will also avoid the following expenses:

• Recruitment fees
• Payroll tax
• Superannuation
• Paid leave
• Redundancy & long-service payments
• Office costs
• Technology & hardware costs
• Subscriptions & licensing for tools such as design software and SEO research tools, which can easily amount to tens of thousands of dollars per year.

7. Recruiting and retaining great marketers is challenging.

We should know – it’s what we do! This is especially true because marketing platforms, algorithms and environments are constantly shifting. If you or your HR team isn’t highly proficient in identifying skilled marketers, then chances are you’ll struggle to attract the industry’s best.

We know who’s good and who isn’t, and we put the professional development and time into building a world-class marketing team – so that you don’t have to.

8. You can clear away the clutter.

There can be serious politics when it comes to managing marketing in-house. There can be buck-passing when things go wrong between different agencies; changes in direction as employees move on; and irrational pivots based on what someone just ‘heard at a conference’.

When you outsource to the right team, this isn’t an issue. We work as one and we’re incredibly focused on working towards your goals with only success in mind. We simply hone in on what that success will look like for you, what the scope includes, and we get to work.

 9. Outsourcing can provide a path to transformation.

As Deloitte’s global outsourcing surveys have shown, the primary reasons for outsourcing have shifted from cost-cutting and innovation back in 2016, to more transformational and disruptive objectives by 2018.

Business leaders are recognising that outsourcing disruptive solutions can be faster, scalable and more profitable than developing the same capabilities in-house.

10. You can work with someone who ‘gets it’.

The fundamental purpose of marketing? Making you money. In hiring Rocket you’re hiring business people who specialise in marketing. We do what we do to generate leads, deliver strong ROI and make you money. Effective marketers understand this; many others do not.

So, Should YOU Outsource All Of Your Marketing?

We’re not saying that every business should outsource all of their marketing responsibilities – many of our clients actually have internal marketing resources, and that works very well for them indeed. But for certain Australian SMEs, the benefits are undeniable.

Five signs that fully outsourcing your marketing could be right for you:

1. Your marketing staff are under- or over-worked.
2. You have random staff performing your key marketing functions.
3. Your paid advertising is getting you precisely nowhere.
4. You don’t know what you’re receiving for your marketing spend.
5. You know you can’t get all the expertise you need in one new hire.

How to make it work: Finding your Internal Champion

All of the above sounds great, and it is. But for us to succeed together you’ll need an Internal Champion – someone on your side who will help us smash your goals. This person may be a marketer, or they may not. This person may be you, a partner or the company founder. Typically they’re loyal, empowered and experienced within the business.

Here are the traits that make for an amazing Internal Champion:

• Someone with the bandwidth to review work and give feedback and approvals.
• Someone who has the EQ and IQ to transfer information from inside your organisation in a clear and constructive way.
• Someone who can make quick decisions when needed.
• Someone who understands your business intimately, including what your product does, the problem(s) it solves for your customers, exactly who your customers are, and who they are not, as well as how your offering compares with the competition.
• Someone who cares about the success of your business more than their personal career trajectory – because someone who cares more about their next promotion or taking credit will not do your company justice.

While we can guide you through each of the above processes, your Internal Champion ensures we have the right information to drive results for you.

It’s only natural that with the effects of COVID-19, many managers will be thinking about how to operate with more agility and economy – but it’s also a great opportunity to gain market share and to be there for your customers via your marketing function. Fully outsourcing your marketing team may be just the solution you’re searching for.

The best way to work out whether outsourcing is suitable for your business is a confidential conversation with a senior member of the Rocket team. Call us on 1300 059 620 or send us a quick email, and we’ll sit down to discuss which level of “outsourcing the rest” might suit your needs.