The complete guide to outsourcing your marketing services

Marketing has become complex, time-consuming and heavily labour intensive. In the new digital marketing world, businesses need to be ‘always on’. This directly affects businesses’ efficiency levels, struggling to prioritise where they should focus their efforts, resources and investments. The impact is felt across brand equity, digital presence, meaningful audience interactions and overall, the bottom line.

How can outsourcing help? Outsourcing marketing services, such as graphic designers and SEO specialists, can result in increased lead generation volumes and improve sales conversion rates. By outsourcing your technical marketing tasks to the Philippines, you free up your onshore marketing teams time to focus on identifying opportunities and developing marketing strategies to scale your business. 

In this blog, we will take you through what outsourcing actually is, how it can be achieved without significant investment and the positive impact it can have on your bottom line. 

What is outsourcing and how does it apply to your marketing functions?

Outsourcing is a fee for service contracting arrangement. Simply put, outsourcing is the process where an organisation engages a third-party provider to handle certain business functions. Organisations identify areas of opportunity where they may be looking to lower employment costs, increase staff satisfaction, or simply want to scale their operations. Once they've identified the business function that is holding them back from achieving such goals, that's when they consider solutions to solve the pain point, and outsourcing might be the one for them.

How does this apply to a business's marketing services? Take, for example, a business's digital marketing team. The steps to setting up an outsourced digital marketing team would look along the lines of:

1. Inform your existing staff and identify what digital marketing tasks you want to offshore
2. Engage with the right outsourcing provider
3. Organise, with the support of your chosen outsourcing provider, what technology is needed 
4. Create a job description for your digital marketing specialists for your offshore recruitment team to then skills test and interview potential candidates
5. Decide on offshore digital marketing specialists and begin training and onboarding
6. Don't worry about infrastructure, IT, and facilities; your offshore provider will take care of all of that
7. Go live with your newly established outsourced digital marketing team and develop ongoing management procedures with your offshore provider.

What marketing roles can be outsourced?

Depending on your organisational needs, you may find that you'd like to outsource one or two roles or even build a team offshore.To decide what roles you’d like to outsource, start by identifying the tasks that are time-consuming and technical in nature. By offshoring these, you’ll find your existing onshore team now has the time to strategise and develop campaigns. Ideally, your offshore marketing team is there to support content creation and help generate more resources for your onshore team to utilise.

Here is a general overview of the marketing services that can be outsourced:

1. Copywriters and content writers

2. Digital marketing specialists

3. Graphic designers

4. Marketing specialists/assistants

5. SEO specialists

6. SEM specialists

7. Social media specialist and content moderators

8. Video editors and website designers.

Marketing is often easier for a business to outsource as onshore team members can create briefs and templates for their offshore counterparts.

Where can you outsource your marketing services to?

Two words: anywhere and everywhere. Because of outsourcing's remote work nature, an outsourcing provider could be just a block away, or on the other side of the world. But that's what makes it great, how easily accessible and easily attainable outsourcing can be for businesses. Outsource providers are experts at making the change from "in-house to out-of-house" a seamless and comfortable process for both your onshore team and your new outsourced team. This cost-effective staffing solution makes outsourcing a viable option for many businesses. 

What should be your primary concern isn't just location, but rather who you decide to outsource with. How do you know you are choosing the right outsourcing provider for your marketing needs? Do you understand their operations? Will they ensure all important metrics are met and measured? You need to be able to confidently answer questions like these before you even consider signing terms or a contract with your potential outsourcing providers; especially if they are located overseas.

Why outsource your marketing services to the Philippines?

The Philippines is one of the leading suppliers for outsourcing in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry. Outsourcing marketing tasks and functions will not only save on employment costs, but an expected 29.2% increase in cloud-based technology in companies around Australia only makes offshoring a more viable and practical option.

To better understand how the Philippines can provide desired returns for your organisation, here are a few reasons why you should be outsourcing to the Philippines:

• English language proficient

  Given the industry, marketing is all about reaching your target market in an easy, comprehensive manner. With a Business English Index (BEI) of 7.95, Filipinos can communicate effectively with your employees, interpret briefs, and create grammatically correct content and understand marketing lingo.

• Cost-effective and quality

  Due to lower living costs in the Philippines vs Australia, businesses pay LESS for MORE. By spending less to employ staff in the Philippines, organisations gain business efficiencies as Filipinos strive to produce quality work. Depending on your marketing requirements, outsourcing providers can source experienced and qualified employees in the Philippines.

• Strong work ethic

  As marketing requires a creative mindset, having a dedicated team who pride themselves on generating quality and engaging content is crucial. Filipinos value respect and honest effort, so are better suited to creating original material.

• Cultural compatibility

  With a history of colonisation by foreign forces, the Philippines has experienced many different ethics, values and customs. As a result of this, it's created compatibility between Filipinos and other cultures, which gives them an edge in understanding a business's psychological and behavioural customer profiles. They know how to "get into the minds" of the target audience.

What are the benefits of outsourcing marketing services to the Philippines?

Here are four benefits an organisation can get from successfully outsourcing marketing services to the Philippines:

1. Lowering employment costs by up to 70% 
2. Improving staff satisfaction and retention: moving specific tasks to an offshore team member so that your onshore staff can focus on what they were hired to do
3. Creating the ability to scale your business: by choosing a low-cost alternative to employing marketing team members locally, you can reinvest these savings into revenue-generating projects and grow your business.
4. Increasing business efficiency: your offshore marketing provider isn't just a supplier; they are an expert on all things outsourcing. By having them be an "extra pair of hands", you don't need to worry about managing a whole team over in the Philippines and can consult with your new provider on how you can continue to save costs or scale your business as your relationship develops.

How to know if outsourcing your marketing services is right for your business?

Outsourcing allows businesses to reassess what matters and provides them with a solution to lower employment costs, increase staff satisfaction and ultimately free up their time to scale and achieve the growth they've been trying to achieve. 

If any of the following reasons resonate with your business, then outsourcing might be the solution to achieving those goals:

• Save on time: Quality content can take time to create, and sometimes marketing teams don't have the time to produce all the content they want. By outsourcing briefs to your offshore team, you have more time to develop better content and relieve some weight off your onshore marketing team's shoulders.
• Access to industry experts: You're no longer limited to just local talent. Instead, outsourcing expands your marketing horizons; you have access to global skill and expertise you may not have discovered by recruiting inhouse.
• Minimise overheads:instead of paying for a new phone, desktop computer, handling HR costs like annual leave, super and work-cover, by outsourcing your marketing services, you won't need to worry about renting a larger space as you grow or whether there are enough amenities available for your growing team. Many outsourcing providers already have these facilities in place so you can continue to scale and grow without increasing overheads costs.

Considering a blended marketing team?

Marketing has become resource intensive, with so many organisations now struggling to focus their marketing efforts, investment and resources into brand equity, digital presence, meaningful audience interaction and bottom line financials. Discover how one of our clients used outsourcing to successfully create a blended marketing team - improving departmental focus, aligning business objectives and re-focusing on what’s most important.