Marketing consists of three types of activities:
- Strategy
- Project
- Recurring activities
All three can be outsourced depending on your needs, but outsourcing works differently depending on which of the above activities you want to outsource. Below, we go through what can be outsourced and what outsourcing means in each group.
1: Outsourced marketing strategy
Setting a marketing strategy is a rare task, and external expertise can be of great help. The strategy work then involves a number of workshops where a number of questions and discussion topics are reviewed in a structured manner according to a strategic framework.
During this strategic work, you and your partner should decide, for example, which target group you want to focus on and how you can communicate with them to guide them through the buying journey, what you want to convey at different stages, and how you will convey this in practice (e.g., where you can find them and how your marketing automation system can communicate relevant information at all stages).
2: Outsource marketing projects
Companies often need to make major changes or carry out one-off tasks. For example, building a new website, creating a new campaign, or reaching out to a specific target group ahead of an event. We call these activities projects.
Since the jobs to be done are done once or rarely, the knowledge is often not available in-house. And there are probably specialists out there who do exactly these kinds of jobs all the time. That's why these kinds of jobs are ideal for outsourcing.
This requires commitment from you in the form of goal setting, frameworks, and sometimes project management—but it is the partner who produces and delivers according to these goals, using their proven methods.
3: Outsource recurring marketing activities
A large amount of the work done at a company is recurring in nature. For example, regular content production, events, webinars, newsletters, or advertising.
This is ideal for outsourcing, as a partner can quickly learn what needs to be delivered and how quality is measured, and deliver month after month without you having to think about it any further.
If you have recurring activities that you don't want to take care of yourself, it's ideal to transfer the production work to an outsourcing partner so that you can focus on more strategic activities.
