Organizations across the world are showing a strong preference for outsourcing vendors to develop and support their IT function. The Deloitte ‘Global Outsourcing Survey’ report also reflects this trend – currently enterprises outsource their 72% of their IT functions, but plan to increase it by 31%. However, not all segments are thinking of outsourcing.

A September 2018reserach by The Manifest shows that about one-third of businesses (32%) that do not use a digital marketing agency plan to outsource their digital marketing efforts in the next year.  Most companies outsource the digital marketing resources for search engine marketing, for which they do lack the knowledge and expertise.

The business uses the in-house staff on content marketing. However, having an in-house team takes time and effort, which many companies cannot afford. More and more organizations want to outsource their UX/UI design, SEO, content marketing, PPC, email marketing, video production, social media, and public relations to agencies, for the assured returns on money and time.

Here, we explore some of the top reasons why companies should outsource their digital marketing efforts.  

1. Ready access to a qualified and experienced digital marketing team:

You need a dedicated team of digital marketing professionals comprising strategist, researcher, analyst, SEO expert, campaign experts, content writer to come up with winning marketing strategies for success. However, setting up a team for digital marketing activities is a time-consuming and costly affair.

You might be a fashion apparel store owner in a city mart or you may be running a beauty spa that offers hair care services for women. You might require a regular online presence at a low-cost package all over the year, and seasonal campaigns. Maintaining a team of strategy, content, design, branding, lead generation, and ad campaign managers is not only expensive but also difficult for you.

Therefore, hiring a digital marketing agency that takes up the job of creating the right online strategy for you is the best option. An agency already has all the resources you need for focused marketing, minus the worry of maintaining a regular team.  

2. Latest Tools and Technologies for Success:

Having access to the latest marketing tools and technologies is one of the outsource digital marketing efforts. You can have access to special tools and software for fast and accurate research, analysis and strategy, less repetitive activities, faster implementation, optimum ROI and faster achievement of business goals.

What is even more surprising? All of these come at no extra cost. Most digital agencies have a yearly subscription for these tools and will most likely not charge you for this.  

3. Better Business Insights and Transparency:

Hiring a good digital agency gives you transparency. With adequate resources and systems to continuously review and fine-tune the digital strategy, you may expect improved ROI. Also, they maintain transparency on the client’s investments and channels where it is being deployed.

Also, equipped with better insights, a reputed digital marketing agency will know the right digital channels for your business.  

4. Better Presence across Social Media Platforms:

Brands thrive on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Interest, and LinkedIn.  You need to have a strong social media strategy in place and a dedicated marketing team to keep track of all social media updates.

Your brand story needs to be told through blogs, posts, videos, and catchy captions. Hiring a fully-functional digital marketing agency is beneficial; it takes care of all your brand building activities. So, invest in a digital marketing agency that is more conversant with social media trends, rather than depending on in-house resources.  

5. More focused SEO Marketing:

In addition to creating a strong social media presence, a digital marketing agency can also help you grow better with effective Search Engine Optimization.  Experienced SEO professionals will research and come up with appropriate strategies for your website. With the well-thought and crafted plan, you can be assured of genuine traffic to your web pages.

With a proper analysis and regular performance monitoring, they can give you suggestions for improvement, so that you can increase your ROI.  

6. More room for Innovation:

Having an in-house team for promotional activities is good only when your marketing activities are minimal; limited to an annual general meeting or internal events.

The team will be focused more on the internal workings of the brand, rather than its external brand building stories. Having an external agency is great for brainstorming ideas for strengthening the brand image.

Being a third-party digital resource provider, they offer a fresh perspective and can come up with innovative plans for the brand building.    

7. 360° Digital Marketing:

To ensure increased traffic, better brand awareness and higher sales your brand needs to be active in multiple digital marketing and advertising platforms. For this, you need a multi-channel 360-degree digital marketing strategy.

In order to initiate digital marketing with a 360-degree approach and manage it in-house, you need a big team. Outsourcing your digital marketing efforts to a digital marketing agency is a faster and better option, saving both time and money.  

8. Assured ROI:

Hiring a digital marketing agency ensures that your funds will be invested properly. Being experts in marketing, they can focus on conversion.  They spend the time to ensure that you get the results you paid for. This helps you save on time and money while growing your business with experts.  

9. More Focus for your Core Business:

Outsourcing digital marketing to an external agency saves you time and energy so that you focus on your core business. Enterprises today are opting for outsourcing non-core activities to third parties. With the right information and tools in place, a digital marketing agency can plan, develop and execute on strategies that yield results.

While the experts are engaged in executing the promotional plans for your business, you get enough time to focus on other key areas o your business.

10. More Cost-effective:

Last, but not least, cost is one of the most important reasons to outsource your digital marketing efforts. If you are planning to set up a digital marketing team, you must find the right people with the right expertise for research, design, copywriting, development, and PR, analytics, etc. In addition, you have to set aside money for their salary, benefits, salary taxes and any additional expenses that come with bringing on a new employee.

Also, you must not miss out on the time and money it takes to recruit, hire, and train that individual or multiple new team members.   In contrast, hiring an agency takes away all the worries of recruiting, maintaining, or training a team. Also, you may negotiate and go for marketing plans or hire outsource marketing professionals, as and when required.

Outsourcing digital marketing efforts ensure faster and better results in minimum price. Choose a reputed digital marketing agency and closely analyze its portfolio before hiring. Read my earlier post on key considerations for hiring freelancers. Pixel Solutionz is backed by a team of expert digital marketing executives that can provide you end-to-end digital marketing solutions for your business needs. Hire our dedicated digital marketing team and take your business to a new height. Want to share some thoughts? Let us know.  

This means that by 2022, cut down business costs by $8 billion. Facebook’s Messenger has gone up from 30,000 in 2016 to over 100,000 in 2018. Nearly 60% of the millennia rely on chatbots on a daily basis for business transaction or e-commerce. A recent issue of the Chatbot Magazine indicates that by the year 2020, almost 80% of businesses will have their own chatbot.

However, one must perform due diligence before setting up a chatbot for business. Here, we have brought out five quick tips to help you choose the right technology for business chatbots.

Know your business: Choosing the right technology for creating business chatbots require intensive research and inventory planning. First, find out your areas of improvement, that is to say, what business processes need to be revisited to ensure better interaction between you and your employees.

You may need a customized chatbot for marketing funnel guidance, broader reach, getting relevant notifications, or improved brand value. Choose the right technology, depending upon your business type.

Ensure seamless transition: The purpose of a customized chatbot is to help in the smooth running of the business, and not complicate it.  

Choose a technology that ensures a swift escalation path consider using a decision-tree-based mechanism or a sentiment-based framework for the faster transfer of information. Also, make sure that a workflow is defined before you sign up for that attractive chatbots offer popping up at your screen every seven minutes.

Evaluate often, to perform better: You may have invested a good deal of money on deploying a very high-end business chatbot for gauging marketing lead conversion, but the results are as not as promising as you expected. You need to evaluate your choice to select a better solution. To begin with, you can set standards with which to objectively analyze all solutions to find the right one for you.

You may include features such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), contextual awareness handling, integrations, and natural response generation, or exception handling, analytics. Accurate evaluation is critical in identifying the features and functionality required by the business and ensuring correct objective analysis throughout the evaluation process.  

Know your weaknesses: Every business has its own set of weaknesses. Find out yours. Some businesses may have manpower issues, while some others have bookkeeping issues. Many enterprises fail to analyze customer requirements. They need to develop a virtual shopping assistant or a personalized chatbot that keeps note of the user’s online behavior and posts questions accordingly. Invest in technology or tool that will address your business needs and ensure better returns.

Have a backup plan ready:  System outages happen, websites crash, and well, backend technologies to give you a raw deal at times.  But you must have a backup plan ready at all times, to ensure that your business processes do not come to a standstill or you run out of resources.

As a business, you must complete a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to predict the consequences of the business process disruption. This will help you with a recovery strategy in the event of a technological disaster. So, what technology do you prefer for business? Let us know. Comment below.