We proudly identify ourselves as a full service or holistic digital marketing agency. But what does that actually mean and why should you consider outsourcing your digital marketing to an agency like ours? We’d like to break down just some of the key benefits that can be gained from outsourcing your digital marketing and what to consider when thinking about the appropriate budget for your business. In the ever-evolving digital landscape, small business owners are constantly seeking ways to optimise their marketing strategies to reach their target audience. Outsourcing your digital marketing is a great way to achieve this and is often a highly cost effective option, especially if you are considering employing an in-house resource.
As an agency that provides some of these amazing digital marketing services, of course we are going to encourage this. But, and yes here is the but, you do need to think about what budget is appropriate for your business and where that precious budget should be being spent. Let’s explore some of those magical benefits of outsourcing your digital marketing efforts as well as understanding how to determine what is the right spend for your small business.
The Benefits of Outsourcing Digital Marketing
It’s no surprise that we could easily come up with loads of benefits to outsourcing your digital marketing. It’s clearly our brand and butter! However, we did fine tune this list to make sure we came up with key points that are going to provide the greatest benefits to your small business.
Access to Expertise and Experience:
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” – Ferris Bueller
Yes, Ferris is a wise old sage. Whilst you may find it hard to stop and learn a new platform, new tool, new approach and new thing, our business thrives on this. It is our interest to constantly keep up to date with the latest strategic thinking, approaches and tools as they apply to digital marketing and business. We do this so that you don’t have to. Outsourcing allows you to tap into a pool of experienced digital marketing professionals who possess the necessary skills to create and implement a digital strategy. This expertise translates to higher quality marketing efforts and better results.
Cost Savings:
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” – Henry David Thoreau
Often it can seem counterintuitive that spending money on outsourcing your digital marketing efforts will actually lead to cost savings. Bear with us on this point. Everyone needs to be marketing their business. Everyone.
Telling me you don’t, simply because you believe that all your leads come from ‘word of mouth’ is simply not true. So once we are past that point, you’ll need to weigh up, should I employ someone to do this or should I be outsourcing my digital marketing?
Outsourcing often results in significant cost savings compared to hiring an in-house person or team. This is due to the elimination of employee benefits, training expenses, and the cost of maintaining a full-time staff. These savings can be redirected towards other essential business operations.
However, what is often misunderstood by small businesses when they look to employ an in-house person, is the breadth of skills that are required to ‘do marketing’. Think website updates (+ minor design changes), SEO work, content marketing, social media + video across multiple channels, graphic design and then of course ads! Not to mention all the creative thinking that is required to do any of the above work. It’s a divergent body of work that needs a team, not a person. A quick search for a digital marketing unicorn who can do all of those tasks in 38 hours a week leads to a significant dollar investment in that person ( current salary ranges from a low of 71K through to a high of 120K with no guarantee that one person can do all the tasks needed). You need to consider that cost, with what you might be paying a team of people who work for a digital agency to undertake your marketing work.
Scalability and Flexibility:
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” ― Albert Einstein
Outsourced digital marketing teams are highly adaptable, allowing you to scale your marketing efforts up or down as needed. This flexibility is especially valuable for small businesses, which often experience fluctuations in demand. Plus, you can always hit pause on your arrangement and then turn the tap back on later. You can’t just turn off your team and then bring them back on deck later
Time Savings:
“Focus and Simplicity…once you get there, you can move mountains.” ― Steve Jobs
By outsourcing your digital marketing, you free up time to focus on core business operations. This can lead to greater efficiency and productivity. Micro business owners understand this point the most. When you are needed to be hands-on in your own business, you often have severely limited time to do the other parts of your business. You might already outsource your bookkeeping, potentially because your skills don’t lie with balancing your books and preparing your BAS. An expert might take 4 hours to do what takes you 20.
The same is true of your marketing efforts.
What might take you several days to craft and implement a new service offering (think a landing page, email campaign + sequence + blog to launch offer ) a digital marketing team worth anything should be able to sort for you in a fraction of the time ( especially when they have been working regularly for some time – i.e. a partner in your business ). Imagine what income you might have generated instead of mucking around in WordPress, Canva, Active Campaign, Facebook & Instagram for hours ( to just name a few areas).
Access to Advanced Tools and Technologies:
“If you know, you know.” ― Leanne O’Sullivan or even this one “ Free is not better” ― Leanne O’Sullivan
Our agency pays for the tools that you would love to access, but are limited by budget. I know that free is good, but free is not better. It’s our job and responsibility to find and use good tools. As such we are always researching and testing new tools to make not only our lives easier but also to provide better outcomes for our clients. It’
Track and Measure Your Results:
“Measurement is fabulous. Unless you’re busy measuring what’s easy to measure as opposed to what’s important.” ― Seth Godin
Most businesses we come to work with are not actually tracking their digital marketing efforts. They might be tracking something, but it is not likely that they are across all the various areas that they should be paying attention to (full website traffic & analysis, proper social media insights across all platforms, google business performance of course email marketing activities and growth). It really is so important to regularly check in with the performance of your marketing efforts. It is so important however to understand what is actually work tracking and what is shall we say, merely vanity metrics. Who cares if your reel got thousands of views if none of those people entered your funnel. Understanding what is really working or not will help you determine the ROI of your marketing spend and enable you to make data-driven decisions about reallocating your budget as needed.
What’s an appropriate marketing budget for a small business
I hate saying it depends, but it does.
A quick review online via Google brings back numbers that range from 5% through to 20% of your turnover. These number recommendations tend to vary depending on whether your business operates in the b2b or b2c spaces. These numbers also vary depending on whether you include just the cost of any marketing campaigns or whether you also include the cost of planning & executing the campaigns as well. It may have been easier prior to the explosion of digital marketing services to see marketing spend as merely the cost of the specific campaign only. However, I believe that you need to also factor in the resourcing of your marketing activities as well.
So bearing this in mind, what might this look like for your business? If we land on a value of 10% of your turnover should be being invested in marketing your business, what does that translate for you? What choices should you be making about who might help you with this? What amount should be allocated towards paid advertising?
If your business is a startup or a micro business, it is likely that you are going to be the person responsible for doing your own marketing. So unless you have a background in marketing, you really do need to gain some skills in this area. Skills that go beyond the latest Instagram reels trend. For a more established business, it is likely that you will have the room to have a larger budget but choices still need to be made around who will provide the resourcing to do this. It is not likely that you would be able to hire an inhouse person who can do everything. If you are considering working with an agency or freelancer, you do need to do this through the prism of this idea of a % of revenue being allocated to marketing, what is that number for your business. However, you then need to consider what a full-time in-house resource might actually cost and more importantly be able to deliver for your business.
What might seem a high fee initially, becomes entirely reasonable and achievable when this lens is applied.
Our Digital Marketing Packages
Our team offers 3 levels of done-for-you service, perfect for businesses of varying sizes. These services offerings provide support, strategy and direction across your entire digital footprint. The differences in tiers relate to the amount of services that we might take each month. At their simplest, it could mean a set number of social media posts, a blog and email campaign each month. At the higher end, it’s likely to include graphic design, web development, complex funnels and ongoing SEO maintenance and review, as well as what you might expect in the social media and content marketing areas. More work and more complex work equates to higher fees, as you would expect.
Outsourcing your digital marketing offers numerous benefits, including access to expertise, cost savings, scalability, and more. Determining the right budget for your small business involves defining your objectives, evaluating your current efforts, and analysing your industry and competitors. By carefully allocating your resources and tracking your results, you can maximise the impact of your digital marketing efforts and drive business growth. If you are looking for a trusted digital marketing agency, contact us about developing a partnership.
We’d love to take your business on an adventure!
