Outsourcing

Honestly, it will vary depending on what your marketing strategies are. In some cases you will be forced to outsource. Can you design and apply a wrap for a public bus? Probably not, but you may have some one in-house that can create a flyer and print them out. I had a situation where I needed to track phone calls for unique traffic sources (in the thousands)... Instead of creating my own VOIP (PBX server) and buying a block of numbers from AT&T. I used the APIs and services offered by Twilio.com. If your primary goal is using online marketing strategies, the more you can code on your own, the less you'll have to outsource in my opinion. You may need custom landing pages, pixels added, process flow changes, etc. I have custom scripts that scrape content and post on social media but also "outsource" by paying hootsuite.com for their tools and training.

It's simple - outsource what you can't do or don't have time or people available to do internally.

If you are looking to outsource, look into OnlineJobs.ph. We have hired from there before and have had wonderful results. Just make sure that the cheaper the outsourcer is, the cheaper the quality of the work. It gives you an option to contact previous employers as well. I highly recommend that you do that before you hire anyone from that site.

Unless you're an expert at something, outsource it to someone that is. Outsource everything and be the one to manage it/put it all together.

Basically, you outsource something that you are not capable of doing. However, other people outsource services even though they can do those themselves, because they don't have enough time to do so. It really depends on the resources that you have -Micah

The simple answer would be to outsource the kind of work that you or your people can't do. For example, you can manage your company's social media inhouse but have someone on the outside design images and produce videos that you want to post there. Or you develop your website while having someone else take care of your SEO.

Do practice caution if you decide to outsource. I usually prefer hiring Filipinos because they tend to be cheap but good at what they do, but I always still do a background check before hiring anyone on the Internet.

All this depends on the size of your company and the budget it has. You say your company is small, so I would outsource everything.

Do you have time to train people on expectations, standards, style?

Do you have the expertise to direct marketing people?

I'll share a "secret" we learned last year after talking to a lot of people in the financial area. It applies to every other area, including marketing:

The person who gives you the STRATEGY is not the person you want executing the TACTICS.

In other words, the person who gives the direction of what to do is NOT the person you want doing the thing.

The person who gave us our tax planning strategy was not the person we wanted executing that strategy.

In the marketing space that means you don't want your graphic designer telling you what the promotion strategy should be. Or what the branding strategy is. The person who gives you your social media strategy should not be the person hitting the keys to carry it out.

I'm sure you can see the obvious cost advantages here. The strategists cost a lot more per hour than the tacticians.

But there's more.

The bookkeepers and accountants we talked to were only able to give us "Well, it depends on what you want"-type thinking when it came to our tax planning strategy. They could not think "up the chain." Very nice people, one and all...but not strategists. They would happily do as directed. But they couldn't come up with the right direction on their own.

So find and pay someone at the right level to give you the marketing strategy.

Then hire specialists to execute that strategy.

That way it'll all run as a single machine, rather than a bunch of disconnected parts. The SEO will be integrated with the graphic design, instead of the SEO person and the designer believing they're "chiefs" and running their own separate plans in separate directions.

Be crystal clear on expectations, standards, performance measures. Do not leave someone alone and expect them to do their job just because they say they're good at the thing. Manage projects, have the next action step agreed upon, deadlines and so on. This is conducting an orchestra, not "fire and forget."