Business,
Marketing,
Brand Development

Outsourcing helps to reduce costs. Given that up to nine out of ten small businesses are failing in their first year, it’s becoming more important than ever to streamline your processes to ensure that you can stay competitive in the constantly evolving digital space. Outsourcing is one of the best ways to do this, minimizing the time that you waste on tasks that don’t lie within your area of expertise, improving your productivity, and ultimately resulting in a much healthier bottom line for your business. Marketing strategy is one element that small businesses are commonly outsourcing, but it can be a minefield to know which elements are best kept in the house and which should be handed over to professionals. Here’s a guide to which is which. 

Market research
Before you come up with a concrete strategy for marketing your business, you need to choose the area of the market that you want to target and find out how to access and engage with this sector. Both of these things can be outsourced, and it can be very beneficial to do so. Once you’ve determined where your expertise lies, it’s far better to exploit a gap in the market than try to force your idea into an area of the industry that’s already saturated. Outsourcing someone who specializes in performing this type of research will not only yield better results, it will also save you a lot of time and effort.

Company ethos and culture
Outsourcing is both easy and valuable, but it doesn’t work for everything. Whether you’ve got a bricks-and-mortar premise or are fully virtual, the success of your company will often be linked to the follow-through between your and your employees’ efforts and attitudes, and the service or product that makes its way to the customer. An important part of your marketing strategy that you can’t outsource is the kernel of integrity that lies at the heart of your enterprise. You should develop this yourself and ensure it percolates through your whole organization, however small.

Branding
If you want to establish yourself as a serious business, you need to build your brand’s reputation and ensure your products or services are clearly linked to that brand. If you start by building this brand properly, you will save yourself time and money in the long term. To do this, you need a strong, sensible, brand strategy integrating both visual and verbal identification systems with a quality product tied to it that people want to pay for – maybe pay more for if your brand is that well respected.

This is why the branding of your company is absolutely essential to its success, from the logo all the way through to your web design and product packaging. However, the question is how best to achieve this and can you do it all yourself? In many respects, you are better off delivering and selling the services and products you sell. A professional branding firm has the experience and knowledge to apply what you do and to improve, market, and build your brand on your behalf.