9 Signs Your E-commerce Business is Ready to Outsource Digital Marketing

After identifying a niche your eCommerce business can serve, putting in long days to develop or source your products, and dedicating yourself to growing your business, you’re finally seeing results. Congratulations on this incredible achievement! Now you’re ready to tackle the next set of challenges, opportunities, and triumphs that await on the road ahead, but you realize that outsourcing some tasks could make life easier and business better. This is a normal feeling. What entrepreneur doesn’t need more time, energy, and resources?

A basic grasp of digital marketing principles helped expand your business reach, but it seems like a new marketing practice makes headlines every day. Rather than take time away from business operations and customers, outsource online marketing to experienced professionals. That way, they share their industry resources and insights with you while strengthening your marketing strategy. Your business knowledge combined with a professional marketer’s expertise can propel your business growth.

Knowing the benefits of outsourcing digital marketing and knowing when to outsource digital marketing are different things. Which side do you fall on? Here are nine signs you’re ready to outsource audience engagement, analytics, content writing, and everything else to do with digital marketing.

1. You Don’t Have a Plan for Your Digital Marketing Efforts

Photo Credit: Eva Elijas on Pexels

You’ve made a few tweaks to your business site, interacted with customers on social media, and written some solid blog posts. Maybe you want to use your efforts as the seeds of a marketing strategy, but what’s the best way to build and nurture that strategy? Pondering that question would be easier with more hours in the day and more energy in your tank.

Digital marketing agencies make it their mission to devise personalized marketing strategies. By outsourcing digital marketing, you maximize your marketing moves and tap into their true potential. For example, rather than redesign your site completely, a marketing agency may feel it’s more effective to add images and video to break up blocks of text. They can also uncover ways to use those images and videos as a part of your revamped marketing strategy. 

2. You’re Experiencing Slow Revenue Growth

Photo Credit: Monstera on Pexels

Perhaps you retain your current customers and cross-sell products to boost revenue, but you aren’t seeing the desired results. You could do more, such as offer discounts and audit administrative tasks, but no one would blame you for wanting guarantees of success before amping up growth efforts.

Digital marketing isn’t the only way to boost revenue growth, but it’s an excellent starting point. An online marketing firm like an eCommerce SEO agency knows common hurdles that block small business growth. For instance, eCommerce SEO companies let you know how much organic traffic your site receives, determine if you use relevant keywords in your content, and uncover new or under-utilized marketing opportunities.

3. You Fall Behind on Deadlines

Photo Credit: Ketut Subiyanto on Pexels

Looming marketing initiative deadlines kick you into action like a bolt of caffeinated lightning. When you have a growing business, it may feel like you’re in an ever-growing field of pressing deadlines. You want to knock the ball out of the park and meet every due date, but they seem to zip right past you more often than not.

Entrusting online marketing to an agency ensures that you meet marketing deadlines with the high-quality results your business deserves. Digital marketing professionals know how many hours it takes to create landing pages, write blog posts, and design a social media calendar. Outsource your deadlines and reclaim your time and peace of mind.

4. Marketing Initiatives Overwhelm You

Photo Credit: Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels

If pressing deadlines weren’t enough to stress you out, you must also learn the mechanics of marketing initiatives. From brainstorming sessions and objective market research to evidence of results and product testing, a single marketing task may involve several steps. Just like that, a single deadline branches into several due dates.

A digital marketing agency can help relieve the burden on your shoulders. While helping you juggle marketing initiatives, an agency can also make those initiatives less intimidating. Understanding how marketing objectives work gives you a peek behind the curtain and can defuse that which used to confuse.

5. You Rely on the Same Marketing Channels

Photo Credit: NordWood Themes on Unsplash

Have you adopted an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mindset for online marketing? If so, you may not see much use in changing that. After all, if you’re seeing results from social media and email marketing, why risk messing with a good thing? Outsourcing helps you discover new avenues to explore and add to your existing marketing capabilities.

Because marketing (digital and otherwise) remains in constant flux, new avenues reveal themselves at the speed of light. Insider observations connect you to the expertise needed to explore and understand various marketing channels. And that’s not limited to emerging channels, either.

Online marketing professionals are almost like historians of their industry. While tracking emerging marketing channels, they also study how the old gives way to the new. If there’s an older strategy you aren’t aware of that still nets marketing results, you deserve to know about it.

6. You Struggle With Consistent Content Promotion & Creation

Photo Credit: Jenny Ueberberg on Unsplash

Digital marketing feels like a second job, sometimes, doesn’t it? As a business owner who wears several hats, it may feel more like a third or fourth job. That’s because it is! With so many irons in the fire, it’s challenging to establish a marketing rhythm. Outsourcing a dance partner could help you learn the steps to the content creation and promotion samba.

Digital marketing agencies help plan, create, and promote consistent content for blogs, social media platforms, websites, and more. Agencies also monitor online traffic, letting you know the days and hours your site gets the most visitors. Dropping new content when you have a “full audience” magnifies your marketing strategy. If it works for chart-topping music artists, it can work for you, right?

Customers aren’t the only ones who like consistency. Search engines prefer sites that deliver a constant stream of new content. Of course, a lot more factors determine search engine rankings, but consistency is essential.

7. You Experience Lackluster Marketing Results

Photo Credit: Nick Abrams on Unsplash

You gathered customer review data, studied target audiences, and localized content, but nothing’s moving the needle. There’re more ways to improve strategy performance, but what if they yield lackluster results, too? You don’t want to give up on seeing improvement, but you also have limited resources.

Before launching your next marketing campaign, consult an experienced digital marketing services provider. Together, you can review your past performance to find where you didn’t quite hit the mark. Perhaps all you need is to shift your focus from paid ads to content-driven SEO.

8. You’re Ready To Trust Someone Else With Digital Marketing

Photo Credit: Savvas Stavrinos  on Unsplash

Maybe you already know the benefits of outsourcing digital marketing. It’s an idea that’s lived in your mind rent-free, and you’re waiting for the right partnership opportunity to come your way. 

Finding the right digital agency to hand over your company’s marketing reins to isn’t easy. Keeping a few things at the forefront of your mind during this selection process will be helpful. 

Ask yourself, “does the agency understand my business and its goals? Does it have measurable proof of impact? Is it agile enough to pivot based on my business needs? When you find an agency that ticks these boxes, working together will seem like the natural thing to do. 

9. You Recognize a Single Marketing Professional Comes With Limited Resources

Photo Credit:  Denise Jans on Unsplash

Hiring an in-house marketing professional is a great start to improving your strategy, but take a step back for a wider perspective. While one person may confidently navigate digital advertising, social media marketing, and marketing automation (which truth be told, are all different digital marketing verticals and shouldn’t be handed over to a single person), what services are missing from the equation? That same in-house hire may have little experience with PPC campaigns, conversion rate optimization, and UX design. 

Rather than risk leaving opportunities on the table, cover all your marketing bases by outsourcing to an agency. Small companies with only a handful of employees could have decades upon decades of experience. Hiring a single agency rather than a single employee could work better than you imagine.

Timing is everything when running a business. Which of these signs resonated with you the most? Don’t let the chance to grow your business further pass you by!

Author: O’BRIAN GUNN

O’Brian attended the University of North Alabama, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in Professional Writing. As a world weaver and word wrangler, he loves writing sci-fi and fantasy stories exploring everything from accidental heroes to (in)human resource representatives for gods. While not churning out creative content, he enjoys reading, gaming, singing, and watching movies.