Why You Should Outsource Your Digital Marketing

Is your organization growing? Are you looking into an investment in some further marketing to boost your growth? Maybe you already have a website and a few social media ads. Maybe you are starting from scratch! You’ve probably begun some research and you may have come to this query-to hire an internal marketing team…or outsource?

There are benefits to either option, no doubt, depending on the size and type of your organization. If you are a newer business, or a growing business, either way-one of the biggest factor when looking into a marketing strategy tends to be the budget.

Did you know that the national average salary for a Chief Marketing Officer is $189,521? That’s $15,793 per month-and that doesn’t even include the cost of a marketing team you would need to hire underneath the CMO. According to the U.S Small Business Association, organizations should spend about 10-12% of their annual revenue on marketing. So if your company did about $2 million per year, you could ideally afford this salary range for a CMO. The problem is, there are so many costs outside of this salary to account for, such as:

• Onboarding and training costs (nonproductive work)
• Health insurance and other benefits
• Vacation time
• Sick time
• Additional utility bills (for extra office space, internal housing of CMO)
• Additional team members (ideally 3-5 more team members for inbound marketing)
• Inbound marketing software costs
• Ad spend

…and the list goes on.

By hiring an outside agency, you will benefit in these ways-

No extended onboarding or training costs-we are already experts in our field

To hire an internal team, you will need at least 3-5 people for an effective inbound strategy. Each of these people would require at least 2 weeks of training to not only get immersed in your brand but to get familiar with all inbound software and strategies. This could include completion of Google certifications, lengthy training periods on multiple platforms for CRM, SEO, email marketing, and that list goes on. If you don’t already have one internal marketing expert, you may end up hiring outside help to do your internal training anyway! And you are already wasting money since this 2 week training period is non-productive work.

An external marketing agency will not require 2 weeks of training, as they are already experts in their field. They would only require an immersion training in your brand, which would ideally be included in their on boarding process. Most marketing firms will have some sort of initial intake survey along with a 1-2 hour brand immersion call, or initial meeting. This allows you and the firm to get on the same page for organizational culture and goals. You are already saving time with only a potential half day of immersion, rather than 9.5 working, non-productive training days, right from the start.

You won’t pay for any benefits

With an internal team of 3-5, you are going to be forking out a lot of cash on benefits, from health insurance to paid time off. With an outside firm, we take care of our own benefits. Think of what you could do with all of those savings on benefits! The average cost of benefits for one employee is 25-40% of their pay. So a CMO at a $189,000 salary would actually cost your company anywhere from $236,000 to $264,600!

With this additional savings, you could bump up morale by paying your existing team higher salaries, give everyone an extra vacation day, spend more on ads, beef up your website, the options are limitless.

No additional utility bills, as the firm will have their own office

While you may have room for additional offices, there are many other factors to consider when it comes to additional overhead costs. Each new team member will need a computer, a space to put that computer, either a desk or an office, and so forth. And while it’s a much broader range cost that will vary by industry and region, you can easily assume higher consumption of utilities and hard costs with each added employee.

More employees will use more electricity, water, and other utilities. They will also use more of the small things that are easy to leave out, such as toilet paper, styrofoam coffee cups, and other such hard costs. All of this will be saved on an external firm, minus the occasional meeting and shared cup of coffee.

Hire one, experienced team, rather than multiple internal employees

When you hire an internal marketing team, you will most likely hire people who show expertise in a specific area, such as web development, SEO, content writing, or ad management. With an external firm, you will likely find a team where each individual holds multiple areas of expertise. Since they’ve been working in the field for so long, they likely have collected multiple certifications and gathered experience in many areas.

It is highly likely that you find a team with a web developer, who also manages the email automation. Or a content writer that also manages SEO. So many of these fields are directly related to each other, that marketing experts know what expertise areas individuals should have-and know that it should be in more than one area. An external team with multiple areas of individual expertise will also benefit you in that you will have many eyes on your goals. Many hands make light work!

Save on software costs through external agency partnerships

When you hire an internal team, you are also going to need to hire, in a sense, an external team for your software needs. Here are just a few of the programs many marketing firms utilize and/or have monthly subscriptions to WordPress, HubSpot, Salesforce, SharpSpring, Trello, Venngage, Google apps, Outwit hub…to name just a few!

By hiring an internal team, you get the joy of purchasing all of these (and maybe different ones, maybe more or less, but you will need some for sure) and setting them up yourself. By hiring an external team, you don’t have to worry about any of that! External firms are paying for the software, so the cost is spread out among all the clients so you, again, pay less. You can usually receive better benefits too because firms usually have deals with software companies to be agency partners. Partners can usually offer discounted rates to their clients and/or better offers.

Some of these platforms hold their own development costs as well as monthly subscriptions. Imagine having to pay a couple of thousand dollars for each of these, just for setup, support, and training-not to mention your monthly subscription! An external firm would likely be able to waive any development costs for these platforms as they will be doing your onboarding and will build that into your monthly retainer.

Taxes-an outside firm is a business expense

Did you know you can expense certain parts of your marketing budget? Including salary and contractor costs? While you can expense marketing staff salaries, you still can’t expense benefits or other costs, but with an external firm, or contractor, you can potentially expense the entire cost.

Check with your accountant for specific details!

More money to spend on ads

At the end of the day, if a marketing strategy is done effectively, it should essentially pay for itself. The whole point of a marketing strategy is to increase your revenue(and better yet do so while simultaneously decreasing expenses), so if you’ve saved so much money by hiring an external firm, you might as well spend more money on ads.

The potential reach on Facebook alone, for $1 (the minimum ad spend) can be upwards of 4000 people. While this is likely the high end, with specific and other variables, it’s still important to understand. In fact, imagine if you even reached an additional 100 people with $1! Wouldn’t that be worth it?

Surely you can now see the benefits of outsourcing your digital marketing! So before you hire even that one employee for $3000 a month to update your website and your social media-think of hiring a digital marketing for that same amount and getting much, much more in expertise, software benefits, and other cost savings.

Do you have any more questions about how an outsourced digital marketing firm could benefit you? Fill out this form for a free consultation with our team.