Marketing consists of three types of activities:
- Strategy
- Projects
- Recurring activities
All three can be outsourced depending on your needs and in-house capabilities and the outsourcing will cater to each activity accordingly. Below, we will cover what kind of marketing work you can outsource and what it means for each of the activities.
1. Outsource the marketing strategy
Developing a marketing strategy is not usually something you do very frequently, however, when you do, there is a lot of external expertise available to help you with this. Developing the strategy with a third party involves a few workshops where you go through a number of questions and discussion topics in a structured way according to a strategic framework.
During such strategy work, you and the outsourcing partner should, for example, define who your target audience is, how you can communicate with them in a way that guides them through the buying process, and what you should convey at different stages. This, for example, involves discussions around where to find them and how your marketing automation system can communicate relevant information at all stages.
2. Outsource a marketing project
Companies often need to make major changes or one-off projects. This could, for example, include building a new website, creating a new campaign, or reaching a certain target group prior to an event.
Since such projects are to be done only once or very rarely, there often isn’t any knowledge available in-house. Again, there is a lot of external expertise available to help you with this and as such, this type of work is ideal to outsource. The commitment required from you relates to setting the objectives, defining the framework and sometimes doing the project management, but it is the partner who delivers the work in accordance with the objectives.
3. Outsourcing recurring marketing activities
Often, a large amount of the work done by a company is of recurring nature, such as for example regular content production, events, webinars, newsletters or advertising. This type of work is also ideal to outsource because a third party can quickly learn what to deliver and how quality is measured, and deliver month after month without having to invest time understanding the objectives and developing the methodologies every time.
If you have recurring activities that you don’t want to take care of yourself, it is a good idea to outsource it to a third party so that you have more capacities to focus on strategic activities.
