Adding Outsourced Marketing Services to Your In-House Efforts

Enrich Campaign Performance While Conserving In-House Resources 

If you feel like your marketing goals and aspirations don't match your capability to achieve them, you’re far from alone. Be it a lack of time, accessible resources, or niche expertise, there are multiple reasons businesses might opt to outsource marketing activities — even when they have their own existing in-house marketing teams. 

That said, you might not know what to take into consideration if outsourcing is on the table. For example, how might you leverage this external expertise? Should you begin looking at available freelancers instead? Would bringing in another marketing team effectively augment your team... or effectively replace them?  

The good news is that outsourcing marketing services doesn’t have to be a risk-riddled mystery. Let’s break it down. 

Why Consider Outsourced Marketing Services? 

When you partner with an external marketing services team to complement your in-house capabilities, you reap the benefits of new insights and perspectives. It’s an opportunity to try new things — new channels, new creative approaches, or a new outreach cadence — that maybe you haven’t had time to try yourself. 

You can also leverage external marketing expertise to: 

• Expedite the content creation process without sacrificing brand quality 

• Get new campaigns in market quickly when in-house teams are at capacity 

• Develop a more comprehensive omnichannel strategy 

Collaborating with a marketing services team virtually assures that you’ll acquire new knowledge and capabilities to bring back to your internal team and key stakeholders and inform your future marketing strategies. 

To Freelance, or Not to Freelance? 

Once a marketing team decides it’s time to outsource some of its workload, freelancers are a common go-to. But how do you decide whether a freelancer or marketing services team is the best fit (“best” = the most efficient, cost-effective, and/or flexible to your needs)?  

First, ask yourself: What cogs are missing from your current marketing efforts? 

The benefit of partnering with a marketing services team is that they can often provide solutions with the ability to quickly pivot and adapt to external industry trends as well as your internal changes in goals or prioritization.  

Whether they’re providing scalable content creation methods or reliable audience data (more on this later), outsourced marketing teams are often able to deliver services that are specialized to fill the niche gaps in your current strategy. 

Marketing Services for... A Marketing Agency?  

You might ask, “Why would a marketing agency want to consider outsourcing some of its workload to another marketing services group?” 

This does sound a bit counterintuitive, but there can be a variety of answers to this question. One is that agencies have to prioritize client commitments, meaning that their own brand marketing is often put on the back burner. Additionally, they may need the extra help to manage multiple high-volume client projects if their team is spread too thin.  

In these cases, an outsourced marketing team isn’t necessarily brought in to “shake things up” — to reverse or undo any current client strategies or support systems. The value is in the external team’s ability to step in and supplement what the agency team is already doing — getting a new campaign launched, promoted, and off the ground in a more focused, more streamlined fashion.  

Not only does this provide faster time-to-value for the agency's clients, but it allows the marketing agency itself to reclaim the time it needs for other revenue-generating activities. 

Optimizing by Outsourcing — The Bottom Line 

The decision to outsource marketing has to include considerations of cost control and making the most effective use of your marketing budget. 

For one thing, by outsourcing your marketing, you can make sure your team or business is only paying for the services it needs — and only when it needs them. Additionally, outsourced marketing can be used to enhance capabilities in one or more specialized areas, such as graphic design or SEO, instead of having to invest in those resources in-house. 

Other budget considerations involve physical marketing spaces or martech — marketing tools and technologies. Outsourcing presents the opportunity to conserve that budget and use it to fund new campaigns or programs that more directly support the goals of your business.  

How to Move Forward Once You’ve Decided to Outsource 

Having decided that outsourcing marketing makes sense for your organization, the next step is to find the right external team. A marketing services team is working for you — you’re the client, and that team should partner with you in ways that reassure you that they have your business’s best interests in mind.  

You should be able to lean on the external team to deliver strategies tailored to both your brand and your company’s unique growth goals. Your marketing services provider should remain transparent and flexible, keeping you in the loop while taking the workload off your plate as needed. 

Start by sharing with the prospective external team what you’ve done internally and asking them how they can make it better — how they can optimize those tactics to hit higher numbers. And don’t overlook one additional, important consideration: What does this prospective marketing services resource bring to the table in terms of audience data and marketing analytics? 

For example, everything the Dun & Bradstreet Marketing Services team does starts with audience data. The Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud provides powerful capabilities to leverage B2B or consumer data — or use them in combination where appropriate — to streamline the targeting process and find your ideal buyers. This data can even be combined with your first-party data to identify the most promising growth opportunities for your business. 

In other words, the D&B Marketing Services team knows how to augment and improve clients’ data, plan out and execute campaigns, and continually optimize with both your budget and end goals in mind.