Website Design and Development

Does this point surprise you? It shouldn’t. Websites are the most important marketing tool in today’s business world. It’s the first thing that customers will check when dealing with your business. Not only do you want your website to be sleek and trendy, but you also want it to be SEO and keyword optimized.

The problem with building a website in-house is that you are not going to get the same secure, intuitive, and accessible website that you would if you hired a website development agency that specializes in building websites.

Moreover, the website development field is constantly developing and changing. The kinds of websites that were popular even just a few months ago will not be in vogue right now, and a full-service marketing agency will know what’s what.

If you are thinking that a website development and design team could be expensive to hire, then you are right. But consider that your website is the centerpiece of your business endeavors. Without a good website serving your customers, you are not going to get anywhere. That’s why it’s time for you to spend a bit of money getting a proper website built.

Also, consider this. Your in-house marketers will have built maybe one or two websites in their lifetime.

A website development team builds new websites every single month with varying layouts, designs, and options. If you hire them, they will be able to come up with a great design for you, with brilliant functionality. They might even be able to give you suggestions on how to improve your website, so it’s even more eye catching and conversion-friendly than before. Your in-house team wouldn’t even be able to compare to that.

Think About the Numbers

Finally, think about the numbers a bit more carefully. If you assign the task of building a website to someone on your marketing team, who earns $50,000 a year, and they spend 3–4 months entirely on this task, then you are still paying through the nose for it.

Wouldn’t it be better to hire a website development team for the same cost? They would do a better job of it, and they wouldn’t come up with a boring, bland, and ugly design that makes all your customers run in the opposite direction.

Graphic Design

This is another one of those no-brainer sets of tasks to outsource, but few businesses end up doing this. Just because you have a person on your team who ‘does’ design work, doesn’t mean that you should assign that person all the marketing design tasks. This is because there’s more to graphic design work than just creating logos and images.

Design work has to meld with and be in synchrony with all the other branding related to your business. When you give one-off design tasks to a marketing team member to complete, they are probably not going to think about the entire branding picture as a whole before creating the design.

Also, design work has become more and more complicated as time goes on. It’s not just about using Adobe Illustrator to create something that looks good.

Some graphic design tasks that you should outsource are:

  • Any kind of header image like for Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels
  • Blog header images
  • PPC ad images and ad banners
  • Images placed on your blog posts
  • Creating infographics and lead magnets of all kinds
  • Magazine ads
  • Trade show magazine ads
  • Brochures and other giveaways
  • Any other kind of sales material

When you start thinking about all the design work that needs to be completed every week in a business, you might be surprised at how many tasks there truly are. It’s better to have all this outsourced to a design agency, rather than take up the precious time of one of your marketing team members. They already have a lot on their plate.

Major Rebranding Projects

If your business is going through a major rebranding project, then getting some expert outside help for it is a great idea. It’s not to say that your in-house marketing team wouldn’t be up for such a monumental task. But know that if you assign this rebranding project to them, ALL other marketing work will be halted for weeks or even months on end.

A rebranding project isn’t a walk in the park, and it will require the gargantuan focus and assistance of everyone on the team. This is even more true if you have a small 2-5 person marketing team.

Also, same as with the website design agencies, folks who work in these branding or creative agencies are constantly working on new rebranding projects with all sorts of industries and products. They have a wide area of expertise here, and they will be able to bring that to your rebranding project. This won’t even compare to what your in-house team would be able to do. Not to doubt their skills or anything, but how many rebranding projects have they been involved in?

Social Media Marketing

Are you surprised that social media marketing is on this outsourcing list?

In the past, businesses could have gotten away with having a lukewarm social media presence. But nowadays, that won’t do at all. Without a strong social media presence and a constant influx of great content, you will be left behind in the dust pretty soon. Your competitors will be laughing all the way to the bank, while you will wonder what you did wrong.

Also, having your in-house marketing team take care of social media might sound like a good idea at first. But there are dozens of social media channels out there, and each one of them requires a different strategy to be successful.

Are you ready to have your marketing team spend all their time on updating social media pages?

This would require them not only to create tons of images, infographics, videos, and other fun content, but to think of enticing captions, and to converse with all the folks who interact with the content posted. This can fast become the full-time job of your entire marketing team and can be a huge time-suck.

That’s why hiring a marketing agency that specializes in social media and who knows what the best strategy is for each of the social media channels out there is key. If your entire marketing team consists of baby boomers or even Gen-Xers, then you are going to have a hard time capturing the hearts and wallets of the younger generation.

This might be fatal for you if your business relies on the business of Millennials and Gen-Zers. If you have no idea what these terms mean, then run and find a marketing agency asap.

outsourced seo services

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you listen to the SEO experts out there, they estimate that Google changes its search algorithm about 500 to 600 times a year! That’s 1–2 times per day.

Not all the changes will be major updates, of course. But does your marketing team have the time to parse through all the algorithm changes to figure out which ones matter to your business and which ones can be ignored?

Also, if you have a website that has more than 100 pages, then your marketing team could spend ages updating the pages every single time a new Google SEO update hits the blogosphere. It could soon become the full-time job of one of your marketing team members, and if you have a small team as it is, then you won’t have anyone to spare for such an important task.

Some tasks to outsource are:

  • Keyword research
  • Link building
  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Meta tag analysis and optimization
  • Competition analysis
  • Blog post optimization
  • Directory listings and aggregator submission

Organic traffic is the lifeblood of any business, regardless of which industry you are in or what you sell. If you aren’t getting organic traffic, you are going to spend exorbitant amounts of money on Google Ads, which isn’t a great use of your limited marketing budget.

With a good SEO strategy in place, it’s easy to get the right kind of organic traffic to your website (there’s no point in having lots of website traffic with no conversions, more on that later). That’s why hiring an agency that can set up professional SEO services and update your website and social media channels to be SEO-friendly is paramount.

Conversation Rate Optimization (CRO)

Do you know whether all your content creation and other strategies result in significant conversions and ROI? Or are you following the wishing, hoping, and praying technique?

Measuring and analyzing results is a crucial part of any marketing team’s role. But it’s not as easy as crunching the numbers and hoping they pan out.

It requires quite a bit of A/B testing, as that will tell you definitively whether one strategy works better than another in converting traffic. As iterated earlier, there’s no point in getting hundreds of thousands of website visits, when no one ends up purchasing your products or signing up for your giveaway.

With proper CRO outsourcing, you can make sure that the agency you hired will stay on top of these conversion metrics.

Certain things they can be tasked with are:

  • Creating an A/B testing calendar
  • Coming up with new A/B testing hypotheses
  • Evaluating the testability of hypotheses
  • Researching industry best practices
  • Maintaining an A/B history database (so you don’t repeat tests)

Using CRO, you are going to create incremental improvements in your marketing efforts over time, which could result in a considerable payload in the end. Make sure you hire someone who’s knowledgeable about your industry and who has plenty of experience with A/B testing.

Content Creation, Marketing, and Promotion

Do you know the sheer magnitude of content that needs to get created every single day in a modern-day business? It can be the full-time role of your marketing team, but more so, it will probably end up on the shoulders of the youngest member of the team because they are considered to be savvier that way.

Either way, you don’t want to give up control and rely upon one individual to take care of such a cardinal task.

Hiring a content creation agency means that the agency can make all the copy for webpages, blog posts, social media channels, brochures, sales copy, ads, videos, lead magnets, and more. Not only that, but they will have several people on their team, each one of whom takes care of a separate content creation task.

For example, they could have one person who only deals with writing blog post articles for your business, making sure to research them and come up with the more relevant keywords and topics. Another one would be responsible for all the video content, visiting your various stores, or speaking to customers to make content that matters.

One great way you can assist your content creation agency in creating relevant and outstanding content is to have a brand style guide to present to them. This way, each content piece that they create will have a cohesive pattern. This can boost credibility and visibility among your customers.

Email Marketing

Do you believe that email marketing is a dying tactic? Well, you couldn’t be further from the truth. The ROI on email marketing is still quite high, and you would be remiss if you didn’t put some focus and attention on this aspect of your business.

But it’s not easy to build an email list and then market to them. Not only do you have to send emails that are relevant and interesting, so people don’t opt out right away. But you also want to make sure you aren’t too salesy with your emails so that folks aren’t put off by your emails and unsubscribe.

The point here is that you want to market and sell to your email list in a way that they are happy to receive these emails from you.

For example, you could use products from abandoned carts to market in a very personalized fashion to everyone on your email list. Maybe you could offer them coupons or a certain amount off if they go ahead with their purchase.

These are just a few examples, but there are many other ways to use your email and website together in a synchronistic fashion. Very few businesses do this right, and that’s because they usually rely upon their in-house team to take care of email marketing efforts.

There are myriad tasks involved in email marketing, like:

  • Database maintenance and updating
  • Email copywriting
  • Email design
  • Template creation
  • Strategizing
  • Automating certain email campaigns
  • Measuring engagement with emails and doing A/B testing to improve

Does your poor, overworked marketing team have the bandwidth to take care of these tasks? Probably not. Or at least not well enough that email marketing can bring you that ROI you want and desire.

Quality Assurance

This is one role that too many business owners ignore or forget about, assuming that each marketing team member will do a good enough job of quality controlling (QC) of their work.

And then the business is in crisis because an email was sent out with the wrong information or some crucial proprietary information was revealed because there wasn’t a QC person in charge of making sure everything passes muster.

Taking care of all QC work in-house in an informal fashion might work fine enough while you are still small. But as your business becomes bigger and more and more articles, documents, and graphics go into the public view, an external unbiased QC person will become essential.

The QC person can pore over all the fine details and catch all the big and small mistakes, while your marketing people can move on to the next task. This gives a lot of autonomy and freedom to your marketing folks, who don’t need to feel anxious all the time about the marketing materials they produce.

Some other tasks that a QC person can help you with are:

  • Check the copy for all marketing materials for errors and readability
  • Evaluate all marketing materials to make sure they comply with brand guidelines and have no errors
  • Test functionality of links, opt-in forms, and CTA buttons
  • Make sure any sales funnels flow properly
  • Ensure all marketing projects meet a high-quality standard

As your business progresses, you might need a team of quality assurance and quality control folks to take care of all the marketing material you produce. This will ensure that you protect yourself and your brand from any litigation or lawsuits that might happen as a result of misrepresentation or misinformation in your marketing campaigns.

Online and Offline Advertising

You might not have the budget for a lot of offline or traditional advertising currently, like TV or radio ads. But you could still do a few online ads on Google, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. Either way, if you are going to create ads on such social media platforms, you can’t just bungle your way through it. That would result in a waste of precious resources and budgets that could be allocated somewhere else.

Whenever getting into such a competitive field as Google Ads or Facebook advertising, it’s a good idea to hire an expert agency. These agencies do online advertising all day long. They know exactly how to build your ad campaign, so it results in successful conversions and bountiful sales.

Yes, organic traffic is important, but if you are having a hard time garnering organic traffic, waiting around for it won’t do your business any good. Also, organic traffic takes a bit of time to build up.

That’s why online advertising or PPC campaigns are essential to your business’s success.

Here are some tasks that your PPC or ad agency can take up on your behalf:

  • PPC costing and ROI projections
  • Social media platform analysis
  • Demographics analysis
  • Keyword research
  • Campaign setup
  • A/B testing
  • Copy and image optimization
  • Long-term budget planning

There’s a lot more to PPC advertising than creating an ad, putting it out there, and waiting for the sales to roll in. A good ad agency can help you with all that. This way, your marketing team can focus on strategizing and coordinating the efforts of all our outsourced teams.

Outsource Digital Marketing Tasks To Improve Marketing Efficiency

The benefits of outsourcing are many. The digital marketing strategy of a modern-day business like yours needs to outsource digital marketing tasks to ensure that your marketing team isn’t overwhelmed. This also ensures that they end up working on the right tasks. In this manner, you can improve your marketing materials, get more customers moving through the right sales funnels, and boost sales.

If you want help with your digital marketing strategy and would like to outsource some items mentioned above, then we are happy to help. Contact David Taylor Digital today to get help with your digital marketing services.