Outsourcing your marketing activities is a huge step – and yes, it can indeed hold pitfalls that could easily derail a promising collaboration. We'll show you the typical mistakes we encounter, which, if avoided, can save your company valuable time, energy, and money!
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Tip 1: Don't try to keep everything in-house at all costs!
Yes, the first pitfall is indeed this: that the idea of outsourcing marketing doesn't even cross your mind. But why is this such a serious and costly mistake for many companies?
Many people don't consider – or calculate – that the salary cost of a truly experienced in-house colleague (or even an entire department) who is highly skilled and up-to-date in all areas of marketing will likely be much higher than if a freelancer or an agency with multiple specialists managed your online platforms.
Of course, you could hire a more junior colleague with a lower salary or part-time, but then you also have to accept that:
- they will complete tasks slower, less efficiently, and potentially with worse results, as they won't have sufficient experience,
- you'll need to allocate valuable extra resources (time, money) for their training,
- if they're a part-time colleague, they won't always be available when you need them,
- and because of all this, they won't be able to fully relieve you of the burden of marketing-related tasks, not to mention strategy development, which requires greater expertise and insight.
Furthermore, there are countless software tools necessary for effective online marketing that a freelancer or digital marketing agency already possesses, but your company would have to subscribe to separately if you don't outsource your marketing. And we understand if your response to this is that you certainly don't need expensive programs for successful marketing – but let us ask: would a pinpoint accurate software analysis run in seconds, or a report compiled by human eyes over long days or weeks, help you more effectively in making quick, data-driven decisions and outperforming your competitors? (It's worth calculating the costs here too.)
We know there are cases where, due to company size or the specifics of the service or product, outsourcing truly isn't the best idea – but this is the less common scenario. Perform the necessary calculations for both the short and long term, and make an informed decision!
Tip 2: Consider exactly which tasks are worth outsourcing!
If you've reached the point where you're ready to outsource your marketing, pause for a moment and consider which areas seem most justifiable to hand over, and what you'd better keep in your own hands.
Marketing itself is composed of numerous areas:
- you need to create a strategy that supports your business plan,
- based on this, you need to outline offline and online campaign plans, including paid and organic content, and the look and content of your website,
- you need to create texts and creatives for various platforms, to achieve different goals,
- coordinate the channels and exact placement of the appearance,
- track the results on each platform,
- create clear and transparent reports by selecting the truly important metrics,
- intelligently review these, then continuously optimize your content and website based on them,
- and based on these results, iterate again…
#m1-y#In the previous point, we highlighted the danger of trying to keep everything in-house – but it's important to remember that an "outsource everything" approach isn't necessarily an effective or profitable solution either.##
It might be a much more sensible decision to keep certain parts of the process in-house.
If writing your website content, advertisements, blog posts, or other marketing materials requires very deep expertise—for example, if you run a law firm, accounting firm, or medical practice—you or your expert team might be best equipped to produce the highest quality professional content most quickly.
However, determining their topic, placement, integrating them into a strategy, and later advertising them is a completely different matter: if you don't want to delve into, for example, PPC (pay-per-click) ad management or the web analytics and its various tools, it's definitely advisable to outsource these specific tasks.
Even if you have a full-time, in-house marketer who handles writing, editing, proofreading materials, highlighting posts, and coordinating your content, it's still quite possible that you'll need to outsource some related sub-areas. This could include managing a Google Analytics account, setting up web analytics measurements, or creating and executing an SEO plan that forms part of a truly effective, holistic strategy, as well as website updates. These tasks typically don't easily fit into a single marketing position.
A marketing professional or agency can also help ensure that by reviewing your most important business and marketing metrics, the many different numbers and data remain understandable and transparent for you during decision-making, across every single area of your marketing activity.
Tip 3: Choose the right partner for your outsourced tasks!
We know this seems like a completely obvious tip. Yet many people make the mistake of not properly considering their future partner during selection.
Many choose, for example, based on a friend's recommendation – which is perfectly fine, as there's no better reference than a satisfied client's recommendation – but many forget that what works for one company doesn't necessarily work for another.
Even if an agency successfully manages your friend's online webshop, they might not have the experience with an event management company or other non-commerce business that would allow them to effectively help you.
So, always ask for references, and during the first consultation, assess whether you truly match both personally and professionally. For this, we recently compiled some specific questions and tips in this blog post: What to ask a marketing agency on the first "date"?
Besides, of course, don't forget that preparing a marketing plan for a sole proprietorship is different from that for a start-up, and again different from that for a long-established national retail chain. Different budget, different timeline, different advertising history – and we could go on listing the differences.
Rather, spend weeks choosing the right partner, and make sure to consult with several experts and teams before selecting the one who can provide the most support and value to your company in the field of marketing, based on their past experience, expertise, and not least, their approach to clients.
Tip 4: Jointly lay the groundwork for your collaboration!
Once you have your chosen partner, it's important to clarify the goals to be achieved and the tasks to be performed right from the start.
If this doesn't happen, it's a bit like a couple living together without discussing the division of household chores. For a while, both parties put in their share of effort: sometimes doing laundry, taking out the trash, mopping the kitchen, and expecting reciprocity. But after a while, they involuntarily ask themselves: Is this really my task? Shouldn't the other person have vacuumed on Saturday? Do I really have to specifically ask them to do the dishes? Doesn't it bother them that we only do laundry once a week? Why can't they do things the way I like?!
Similar frustrating thoughts can arise for both the client and the online marketing agency regarding marketing tasks if it's not clearly defined in black and white who does what, and when. If we translate the weekly laundry to a monthly status meeting, the Saturday vacuuming to reports sent in the first week of the month, and dishwashing to the PPC campaigns regular optimization, we can discover many similarities in the struggles of parties striving for harmony…
#m1-y#We recommend that you establish with your future partner, both during the initial meetings and within the contract itself, the following:##
- which tasks remain with you and which will be assigned to them (see Tip 2!),
- how you will determine the task schedule,
- and what metrics you will use to evaluate the effectiveness of your joint work.
Tip 5: Don't be afraid to switch! (But don't switch rashly either…)
If your collaboration with a marketing partner isn't yielding the expected results, it's natural to immediately consider a change – either looking for another agency or deciding it's better to keep everything in your own hands.
At the same time, it's important not to make a hasty decision.
Just as in the example above regarding the division of household tasks, it's important here too to first examine why the set goals weren't met, and to ensure that both parties are on the same page.
Are you sure you adequately communicated what needed to be achieved and by when? Has enough time even passed for you to assess how effective the collaboration is? Are there external factors (economic changes, seasonality, etc.) that might necessitate modifying the originally set goals?
If, after considering the above questions, you conclude that perhaps you haven't given your partner enough time to prove themselves, or perhaps you didn't communicate your specific expectations clearly enough, and you only feel the joint work is ineffective "based on intuition," it's better not to immediately break off an otherwise perfectly good collaboration.
Marketing is not a slot machine; it's a long-term investment. It requires hard work and time for its fruits to ripen – anyone who promises you the opposite will likely not be able to make you successful in the long run, and will watch with you as the flame of those initial, easily achieved "successes" dies out. (Unless they disappear first.)
However, if you feel that the goals recorded in writing were not met within the agreed timeframe, or that your partner is untrustworthy or unreliable, then you should definitely consider a change, because in this case, it's not an investment, but wasted time and money.
It's important that just because your first outsourcing attempt might not have turned out perfectly and didn't bring the expected development and return, you don't blame outsourcing itself. Instead, learn the appropriate lesson and choose a partner you can fully trust next time.
Extra tip: be careful with guarantees…
When choosing a reliable partner and considering the possibility of a poor choice, it's important to also discuss guarantees: while the concept of getting some of your money back if the expected results aren't achieved sounds very appealing, we still urge you to be wary of such offers.
#m1-y#Since every business follows a unique path within its own unpredictable economic and social environment, it's impossible to accurately determine the realistically achievable goals at the beginning of a collaboration, even with precise benchmarks.##
Of course, we can talk about 100, 200, or even 500% reach growth if your online campaigns have never run before, or only for a very short time, with a small audience, and narrow geographical targeting – but the real results will be determined not by this, but by the marketing agency's continuous adaptability, flexibility, and deliberate strategy building, which is the true key to effective customer and client acquisition. For example, in the first few months, your ads might run with a lower click-through rate than what you would ideally consider based on data gathered from various sources, or what was expected based on initial estimates – but a team that truly understands its business and knows what it's doing won't immediately start talking about downward trends and refunds upon seeing this, because they know exactly what action plan to pull out of their sleeve for any given scenario to help you achieve your set business goals.
If an agency were to guarantee the achievement of short-term goals at the beginning of a collaboration, which sound good but whose realism cannot be known in advance (e.g., a 100% increase in purchases within 1 month), they would be limiting themselves – and you too – because in case of failure, the collaboration would end before it could be determined whether the goal was even realistic, and what worked or didn't work for your company in the online space.
Summary
Choosing the right online marketing partner might seem cumbersome, lengthy, and even like a waste of time at first glance, but remember: on the other side of all that invested energy awaits a collaboration that will lift the burden of countless decisions, competitor research, market research, strategy development, and continuous campaign management from your shoulders, while also helping you clarify your goals and the path to achieve them. A truly good professional team will help, inspire, and continuously seek new opportunities to fine-tune your online presence and campaigns, covering every area of online marketing, from website development and search engine optimization to striking online advertisements. We hope our article has made it easier for you to embark on this process!
#promobox-en#Are you ready to outsource your marketing activities, or perhaps considering a change? If you're interested in exactly what we can offer you and how, we look forward to hearing from you!##
