The only way to scale up your business efficiently is to hire experienced professionals with a history of achieving client success. But how do you go about this without the frustration of recruiting, onboarding, and assessing new hires? Most businesses jump on the idea of using a conventional outsourced marketing service without thinking about its long-term implications. In the following article, we’ll share with you three reasons why this style of service isn’t ideal if you want to scale up your business profitably and eventually achieve marketing independence.

 

What is Outsourced Marketing? 

Outsourced marketing is when you contract a third party or an agency to take over all or a portion of your marketing activities. They tend to have a higher breadth of experience since they work with all types of clients. This is generally contracted out at a higher hourly rate than if you would have hired a full-time marketing hire or team. 

 

What are the Disadvantages of Conventional Outsourced Marketing?

Non-transferable Marketing Expertise

When you decide to part ways with your outsourced marketing agency, you lose the continuity of your campaigns and initiatives. Typical agencies are very unlikely to share any insights that may make it easy for you to learn their ‘secret sauce’ and exit the contract.

 

This leaves you in the same position as before you hired the marketing agency, without the internal personnel or expertise to carry out marketing initiatives. The intricacies of today’s marketing require a great deal of expertise in areas such as:

 

  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Analytics
  • Content writing
  • Automation
  • PPC

Without an internal marketing team with expertise in executing these activities, it will be nearly impossible to maintain these initiatives, ideate, or create new strategies for your company.

Lower Long-term ROI 

Outsourced marketing agencies also cost more per hour than a full-time hire, often upwards of $150 or more. For this price point, you could hire a small marketing team who can work more collaboratively with other departments. For this reason, the long-term ROI is not apparent with outsourced marketing agencies.

 

After working with your outsourced marketing agency for a period of time, you can also notice a plateau in their ability to grow your business further. This is due to a low level of day-to-day business involvement. Scalability can only be achieved if full-time team members are fully integrated into your business and drive forward current and different cross-departmental initiatives every day. Without daily momentum, achieving a long-term ROI is difficult.

 

Delayed Marketing Strategy & Execution

When you work with an outsourced marketing team, the ability to strategize in an agile way is reduced since they don’t work with your business on a daily basis. They often cannot make quick changes that are required when you pivot your strategy.  

 

They also have less insight into the ins and outs of your business, resulting in fewer opportunities to integrate other internal teams into their plans. Marketing is a business function that must work with other departments to achieve the best results. Sales is often a department that marketing must work closely with on a regular basis to ensure success and alignment across initiatives and strategies. Without regular internal collaboration, your marketing efforts will be unable to reach their full potential, and you will lose out on valuable marketing dollars.

     

In-Source Marketing at Able & Howe

In-Source Marketing™ is the solution to sustainable business growth. Designed by Able & Howe, In-Source Marketing™ is built to help you execute your marketing objectives while building the structures, processes, and assets to achieve marketing independence. The In-Source Marketing™ model gives you access to integrated leadership, strategy, and execution. We work with your internal teams to align company initiatives and expedite marketing strategy and execution.

 

We will help you hire, onboard, and train new employees in marketing skills relevant to your marketing landscape. Our marketing experts work closely with your internal team and have a strong desire to upskill your employees. By sharing our expertise and knowledge, your team will increasingly be able to handle more marketing initiatives on their own. 

 

Having a marketing system and a newly upskilled marketing team in place makes long-term ROI attainable for your company. These assets are required to propel your marketing initiatives forward to achieve your business goals. With the In-Source Marketing™ Model, companies gain the infrastructure to scale and the employees who have the ability to carry out the marketing plan.

Ready to Adopt the In-Source Marketing™ Model With Able & Howe?

Book a meeting to discuss your marketing needs and learn how our In-Source Marketing™ Model can help you achieve marketing independence while scaling your business sustainably. 

 

Written By:

Lucy Turner

Lucy is passionate about the creative and analytical aspects of digital marketing. She combines her experience with a commerce degree, specializing in marketing. Lucy specializes in content writing, search engine optimization, email marketing, and digital advertising.