It can be extremely expensive to hire a lot of staff members for your digital marketing team if you are based in the U.S. and Europe. You are looking for individuals who possess specific skills to handle all of your company’s marketing content, social media, customer engagement, and more. Setting aside the money for training and wages can amount to a lot, especially while your business is small.
However, it is essential to hire people who have both the applied knowledge and professionalism to competently work their jobs. In the digital age, digital and content marketing is no longer an option — it is a MUST. Good digital marketing plans require a lot of planning and are time-consuming to create and execute. But when hiring locals is too pricey and expert help is needed, it’s time to consider internet marketing outsourcing.
What It Means To Outsource Digital Marketing
If you have tasks that you have to fulfill every day, especially when it’s something as labor intensive as digital marketing, it’s better to have someone else do the work. As the company owner or manager of a marketing department, it’s your job to think about how to achieve high quality work at scale but at prices that are affordable.
This is one of the reasons why business owners opt for internet marketing outsourcing to an agency with a network of talented individuals outside of the U.S. If you find yourself looking into this option, hiring an outsource agency like C9 Staff is a great way to start.
Globally Distributed Staff: The New Normal
About 20 years ago, outsourcing customer service operations became a major trend for U.S. businesses. It meant replacing entire in-house customer service departments with cheap labor provided by English-speaking people located in countries such as the Philippines.
Over time, these outsourced departments expanded to include inbound and outbound sales departments, technical support staff, and even back-office management. This allowed companies to trim down their overhead expenses by as much as 70%.
However, today’s concept of outsourcing is much more sophisticated than that.
Today, you outsource not just to lower your overhead and payroll expenses but ultimately to increase your company’s capability to offer services and, thus, multiply your topline revenue. This way, even if you end up spending more on overhead and payroll costs, the growth of your gross income will be by a far greater factor.
To illustrate:
If an in-house creative department of a white-label digital marketing agency generates a gross income of $100,000 a month and you spend $70,000 of that in overhead expenses and salaries, you’re only making a net income of $30,000.
But if you outsource that department and scale it up so you can generate an income of $1,000,000 and spend 25% ($250,000) in overhead and salary expenses, your overhead and payroll costs may have increased by more than 350% but your profits have grown from $30,000 to $750,000 – that’s a growth of 2,500%!
In this sense, you should be looking at outsourcing digital marketing as a method of expansion and deeper specialization of your outfit. So what do you do with your in-house team? When you expand, you’ll need people to oversee your expanded operations.
Therefore, you can use your in-house graphic designers to manage your team of outsourced graphic designers or your in-house copywriter to lead your globally distributed team of copywriters and creative writers. You can also have your in-house team take care of high-value clients while using your expanded creative teams to handle your small and medium-sized clients.
Another way to do this will be to use your in-house team for more specialized, client-facing tasks, such as client acquisition, project management, or account management while outsourcing your actual “fulfillment team” that includes the writer, the designer, the developer, the marketing specialists, and the rest.
You don’t need to get rid of your in-house team and replace them with an outsourced one when you do creative outsourcing. Instead, keep them or even promote them so you can use them as your force-multiplier.
Now that we’ve laid the groundwork for why outsourcing digital marketing makes the most sense, let’s look at how to best execute creative outsourcing with the right partner agency.
Outsourcing Your Digital Marketing Team: Who You Need
You can start off your digital marketing team with a few people and have them fill in important roles that are versatile so they can get more done. If you have people who can competently fill in the following roles, you’re on your way to success. Here are a few of the positions that our clients often ask us to recruit and fill positions for within their organizations:
Web Designers and Developers
While both jobs have differences in terms of areas of focus, both tackle the very essential job of website building. A web developer will build the foundations of websites using a number of coding languages. Meanwhile, the web designer specializes in designing the user experience of the website. When the web designer has a creative vision for the website, the web developer programs it into life.
Content Writers
In the digital era, content creation is a must. People consume videos, photos, articles, and other forms of media online on a daily basis. A good content writer understands that you have mere seconds to get someone’s attention online and knows exactly how to create written content that does exactly that.
Content writers also have an understanding of online marketing tactics and write content that causes people to pause what they’re doing and take a look. Having a skilled content writer on your team means that they can competently write in a number of tones and styles, allowing you to take on a number of clients from different industries.
Copywriters
A copywriter is in charge of creating the written content for your digital marketing materials. They incorporate search engine optimization (SEO) principles and savvy wordsmithing to come up with copy that does more than grab attention and engage your audience — their copy converts. Compared to the content writer, a copywriter’s job is less about writing and more about persuasion through writing.
Moreover, the tone of writing for a copywriter is more interactive and assertive. They call your audience to action by telling a story. This quality makes them ideal for creating product descriptions, landing pages, and SEO-driven copy for you and your clients.
SEO Experts
A person who specializes in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) knows exactly how to increase the traffic and improve the ranking of a website. This entails regularly analyzing and reviewing the website and implementing the necessary changes to achieve that.
An SEO expert must also be familiar with keyword research, programming, and SEO copywriting as they often work and collaborate with different departments. With this person on your team, you can leave them to make sure your website and your clients’ websites are always optimized and seen.
PPC Managers
A pay-per-click (PPC) manager’s main responsibility is to implement PPC strategies across different forms of media. Part of their job involves running PPC campaigns, selecting keywords, and monitoring paid search budgets as well.
Just like the SEO expert, PPC managers also test and optimize different channels, except their focus is more on profitability and ROI over visibility. PPC managers are also required to work with people across different departments, most especially copywriters and SEO specialists.
Social Media Managers
The social media manager’s main responsibility is to maintain engagement and oversee the content across all your company’s social media platforms. This role requires someone to keep abreast with changing social media trends and social demographic shifts.
Outsourcing Digital Marketing: Steps To Get Started
You have the option to either directly hire your staff or have an outsourcing company such as C9 Staff handle the hiring process. If you decide to directly hire your digital marketing staff, make sure you are prepared to handle all administration, payroll, and management of your overseas team. Here are the key steps to ensure that you’re on track when outsourcing online marketing.
1. Narrow your candidates down to the worthy and competent.
You know exactly what you are looking for, so you have to be clear about what you really want when outsourcing digital marketing yourself or via an outsourcing agency. Remember that you will be delegating tasks to people who are remote, so they must be good at what they do and can be relied on to work responsibly and deliver results consistently.
Ask them more personal questions during the interview, like specifics about their job experience and their expectations. These are questions that they can’t easily Google the answers to and help you better pinpoint if this person is a fit for your company.
2. Have the right technology.
Before diving into digital marketing outsourcing, ensure that you have the right communication, collaboration, and project management tools to succeed. In a remote workplace setup, being able to reach your staff easily is necessary. Because you are running a creative marketing team, the right equipment and a fast internet connection on both ends is critical to ensure that all expectations are laid out clearly and deliverables are met as predicted and on time.
3. Find the right creative outsourcing partner.
Outsourcing your digital marketing needs can be tricky, and it will require a lot of work. To make things run smooth and easy, the practical choice would be to partner with an outsourcing agency that’s experienced in handling remote digital marketing teams and has a solid network of talented individuals that perform well and within your budget. C9 Staff, for example, has a proven record of outsourcing creative teams for the biggest companies worldwide.
Outsource Your Digital Marketing Team With C9 Staff
C9 Staff is a company that specializes in putting together globally-distributed creative teams ready to work “inside your company’s world.” We hire, manage, and pay your staff but they can report directly to you. This represents the next stage in the evolution of outsourcing and creating globally distributed workforces especially for the white label digital marketing agency.
We have all the creative outsourcing systems in place to find, screen, recruit, and hire the best talents for any creative position from the world’s top recruitment markets: Central and Latin America, India, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, South Africa, and the Middle East.
We can put a creative team together in any shape or size and for any purpose you can think of.
Do you need a creative team that specializes in content marketing? We can put one together for you.
Do you need a creative team that can focus on SEO, SEM, PPC, and Social Media Marketing? We can assemble one for you.
All our team members are fluent in English and are flexible enough to work in your local time zone.
And the best part is, you can save up to 70% in payroll costs when you partner with us for your outsourcing and expansion needs. In fact, here are some of the global brands we have helped grow exponentially while also drastically cutting their overhead and payroll expenses.
So, are you ready to explore a new world of possibilities for your digital agency? Call us for a free consultation on outsourcing digital marketing today and let’s find a strategic fit between your company and C9 Staff.
