Should Startups Outsource Their Digital Marketing?

Introduction

Competition in the digital world is high and making your mark can be challenging.

More than half of successful startup businesses invest approximately 75% of the total marketing budget in digital marketing, and rightly so. What’s more, about 72% of some of the most successful businesses attribute their success to innovative content marketing strategies and efforts.

Marketing is an essential and specialised part of success for new businesses and is often underestimated. However, almost 37% of new businesses try to handle marketing independently, often with no experience and, inevitably, no success either. 

That being said, running your own in-house digital marketing team or department may not fit your budget or business needs, especially when you’re just starting out. 

Is Outsourcing Good For Startups?

Yes. Although there are pros and cons to startup outsourcing, it can save any business a lot of money and time. 

Moreover, if managed correctly, an outsourced digital marketing team could improve the overall efficiency of your business. Startup outsourcing streamlines operations and frees up your team so that they can take care of more pertinent tasks in their field of expertise. But what does this mean for your return on investment (ROI)? 

Here are five impressive digital marketing stats to show you just how effective it can be.

1. Email marketing generates an average return on investment of 4,200%.
2. Blogging used as a marketing tool is 13 times more likely to achieve a good ROI.
3. Businesses, on average, generate $2 on Google Ads for every $1 spent.
4. 72% of businesses allot success to monitoring their content marketing ROI.
5. 64% of Internet users are more likely to buy a product online after watching a marketing video.

Need more reasons? Here are five ways startups can benefit from outsourcing digital marketing.

5 Reasons Startups Should Outsource Digital Marketing

1. Improve efficiency & focus on core tasks

Time is one of the most valuable resources that you can invest in your business. Hiring and training in-house employees can be expensive and time-consuming, not to mention additional costs like insurance and health benefits. In the long run, internal hires can cost more, despite it seeming like a cheaper option initially. 

Choosing to outsource digital marketing will free up significant time and resources, which you can allocate to other essential business functions, like operational efficiency. 

Digital marketing agencies can assist you in maintaining your business’ online web presence and reaching your digital marketing objectives. This will allow your internal team to focus their efforts on areas they are specialised in so that you can optimise and streamline your internal processes.

2. Develop a digital marketing strategy with expertise

Outsourcing marketing to a digital agency means you’ll have access to tried and time-tested techniques and strategies. They’ll not only have insights into improving your website's appearance and user experience but know how to make your brand more visible too. 

Digital marketing agencies also know how to create focused social media campaigns that drive engagement and set your brand apart from your competition. As a startup, you’ll benefit from a team of experts that has insights into all areas of digital marketing. 

Outsourcing marketing services will, therefore, help drive online traffic to your website, without consuming your entire startup marketing budget. 

3. Lower risks & better results.  

65% of new startups hire complete novices with little to no formal digital marketing training. This is extremely risky in paid advertising, especially when working with big budgets. 

Entrusting your marketing to an agency reduces the chance of campaign failure significantly. By defining your target audience and marketing strategy as well as implementing data-driven campaigns, digital marketing agencies can yield incredible results. 

This is because they understand the importance of ROI from paid ads, monitoring the effectiveness of your campaigns and know how to pivot based on marketing data. 

Digital marketers also keep up with the strategies employed by other relevant market participants. By incorporating some of these cutting-edge methods into their own strategies, they can produce quick results and boost your company’s value proposition with little to no risk.

4. Stay up-to-date with the latest trends

As a new business or brand, choosing the best marketing tools and strategies can be challenging. This is where outsourcing marketing services can help determine the best marketing approach and techniques for your desired goals and results — especially if you need more brand exposure.

Digital marketing companies, stay up-to-date with the latest marketing trends and strategies and are skilled at managing and implementing these trends into their campaigns. 

They also have access to a variety of the latest software and equipment, which is why ensuring you enlist the best outsourcing marketing services to represent your brand authentically is key. Your brand can acquire all this and more through digital marketing outsourcing.

5. Continuous optimisation 

Marketing agencies know success depends strongly on measured performance and hitting goals. Their effectiveness can be evaluated in terms of metrics pertaining to improved search engine optimization (SEO) and website traffic.

They use these metrics and data to constantly refine their methods and develop successful marketing campaigns to target your ideal customers. As a result, they can attract potential prospects for your business and turn them into paying clients. 

As a new business, we know that your budget may be tight, but it’s important to ensure your startup marketing budget allows for continuous improvement to ensure your website is optimised for things like updated search algorithms and trending search terms or keywords. 

Digital marketing outsourcing is an ideal solution to ensure your website performs at its absolute best, continuously.

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Do Startups Need Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is essential for any startup. The competition in the digital space is fierce and you will need to use specific strategies to maximise your reach. 

Below are some important strategies to focus on as a startup:

• A responsive, well-designed, and built website showcasing your services/products
• Video marketing
• Pay-per-click marketing campaigns
• Email marketing
• Search engine optimisation
• Social media marketing and management

Taking the Next Steps

The first step to outsourcing digital marketing is ensuring you have incorporated this into your overall budget. On average, your budget to build brand awareness or generate new leads should be around 11.2% of your revenue. Services to include in your startup marketing budget should include:

• Technology
• Research
• Automation
• Production
• Paid advertising
• Branding
• Content marketing
• Traditional advertising
• New employees
• Unexpected costs

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