“Do I outsource marketing or keep it in-house?”
It’s a common dilemma that exists for many B2B marketers, and the answer differs depending on your company’s situation.
Many of our clients have internal marketing teams who handle most of their day-to-day marketing activities.
But they don’t always have enough time—or the specialized expertise—to develop and execute a full range of marketing functions.
Outsourcing B2B marketing, or marketing managed services as we like to call it at Symbiont Group, doesn’t mean shipping jobs out of the country.
It’s about making your life easier by giving some (or all) of your marketing to-do list to a dedicated team who can handle it for you, allowing you to focus on your own success.
Help is out there. You just need to know when to ask for it. Here are 5 telltale signs it’s time to outsource your marketing:
1. Your marketing team is overworked.
If you have more than 160 hours of marketing work that needs to be done each week and only two people to handle it, you know the math just doesn’t add up. This is especially true if you don’t have approval to hire another full-time employee.
Think of all the tedious hours spent creating and distributing emails, developing sales collateral or publishing new content.
With outsourcing, you can get those hours back—leaving you and your team free to work on what you do best: running your business.
2.Your marketing strategies take a back seat to execution.
Are you so busy keeping up with your sales team’s increasing demands that you don’t have time to develop your own marketing plan? You aren’t alone.
Strategy is crucial to marketing success. When you outsource your marketing strategy needs to an agency, you gain an experienced team that can take you from good idea to goal achieved.
And in the best circumstances, that team essentially becomes part of your own.
3.Your marketing team’s skill set is limited.
An in-house team may not have developed all the skills your company needs. Outsourcing B2B marketing services gives you access to expertise in all things marketing, from marketing positioning and strategy to execution and beyond, without having to pay for a full-time employee.
Each member on your external marketing team is a specialist in their discipline area and works with clients across multiple industries. This allows you and your team to tap into the agency’s wide-ranging experience and gain a fresh perspective on what you can do to improve your own marketing efforts.
4.Your business lacks the marketing technology it needs.
New, critical categories of marketing technology roll out constantly. And new vendors enter and exit the landscape. It’s hard to stay on top of it all. Where do you even begin?
Many companies are deprived of crucial marketing technology like a CRM or marketing automation platform. These same companies are often intimidated at the thought of acquiring and learning a new piece of technology on top of taking care of their day-to-day responsibilities.
When you outsource your marketing services, you’re able to work with professionals well-versed in the latest technologies for marketing, analytics, automation and more—without having to invest hundreds or thousands of dollars in additional software or tools.
5. You don’t know how to measure the results of your marketing efforts.
Companies spend marketing dollars to attend trade shows, produce marketing collateral and run campaigns. What are you getting in return? Can you quantify the results of your marketing efforts to justify the money spent?
An agency can work with you to define your overall marketing goals, provide recommendations around which tactics can help get you achieve them and, most importantly, report how those tactics are performing. This gives you visibility into which tactics are most effective.