Outsourcing eCommerce Marketing Versus In-house

Your eCommerce business requires many marketing activities to keep the business growing. You need SEO, paid ads, social media, content marketing, automation, conversion rate optimization, and many more marketing tasks. Who is going to do all of these tasks? That’s why many eCommerce business find themselves asking:

Is it better to outsource your eCommerce marketing than to do it in-house for your business?

Well, it depends. There’s a few factors you have to look at if this is something you are seriously considering. They are:

• How big is your company?
• What are your goals?
• Who is handling your marketing right now and are they successful?
• Do you want another perspective?
• How much will it cost you?
• What’s the bottom line?

Answering these questions will make this seemingly hard question easy to tackle.

Fortunately for you, you don’t have to do this by yourself. We are going to look at each question below and weigh the pros and cons for you.

Continue reading below and find out if you need to keep your eCommerce marketing in-house or outsource it.

How Big Is Your Company?

Your company will fall under one of these categories or stages:

        1.  Getting start to small business
        2.  Medium business
        3.  Large business

Why does the size of your business matter? Because the marketing needs and goals for your business is dependent on the current stage of your business.

If you are getting started or you are a small business, then somebody in-house can do all the marketing. As a matter of fact, you can do all the marketing. Additionally, a small business has to watch every penny. You have to be careful where you are spending your money. If you don’t spend your money wisely, you might not make it that first or second year.

A medium business can start playing around or weighing whether to outsource. They are more established and can probably afford it. Anyway, at this point they have already outsourced their website and graphic design. For a medium business, it comes down to cost, results and optimizing their process. If outsourcing can get results while keeping costs down then outsourcing will be attractive.

Big businesses should definitely want to outsource their marketing. A benefit of outsourcing is that they will get agencies that can help establish and grow their brands. Agencies that are capable and can be creative and bring different ideas for the business. On top of that, many agencies work with different companies in different industries. This experience will prove useful because they have tackled and solved many problems. Even though they have outsourced, the internal team will need to work with the marketing firm. They’ll need to communicate the brands needs.

What Are Your Goals?

The goals of your eCommerce company will dictate your marketing strategy. Are you looking to double or triple your growth in a specific timeline? Do you want fast growth in a few months or are you working for the longterm growth? Depending on how aggressive your goals are, you might need a bigger team to achieve those goals. If that is the case and you can afford it, then maybe you need to hire more people for in-house. Or, if it is equal or cheaper, outsource.

Who Is Handling Your Marketing Right Now and Are They Successful?

Why are you considering outsourcing? Is it because your current in-house team is not delivering results? Or maybe you just don’t understand marketing? If you are looking for results and your in-house team is not delivering, then maybe hire new marketers. Move around your current marketers to tasks they can deliver for the company or fire them. Then hire new marketers who have the skills to get results.

Do You Want Another Perspective?

If you are not the creative type or someone who can think outside the box, you’ll need to hire one for your team. Outside the box thinkers will generate a lot of ideas for your business and look at problems from different perspectives. Outsourcing your marketing in this case can be beneficial because agencies solve a lot of problems for their clients. They have the skills to bring new and different ideas that you have never thought of. If you are a small business, this is where it helps to have a supportive group of entrepreneurs who can help you. Or friends and family.

How Much Will It Cost You?

Making a profit in business requires keeping your costs low. How low can you keep your marketing costs? Is an in-house team cheaper than an outsourced team? If you can keep your marketing costs low and get great results that is good for the business. So, in this case whichever team helps keep costs low and makes you profitable wins.

What’s the Bottom Line?

You are running a business and the goal is to make money. Marketing will help get your brand to customers and in return generate revenue. Your eCommerce business needs to build a team that will deliver results and at a low cost. When you are getting started, that may mean you have to do everything. As the business grows and you get more resources, you can hire a team. Whichever team will serve your business the best will ultimately get the job. That could be the in-house team or the outsourced team. The bottom line is you need to make money and whoever has the best ROI will get the job.

We hope that by weighing the pros and cons presented here, you will know whether you need to keep marketing in-house or outsource it. Are there questions we are missing? How would you go about making this decisions? We would love to hear your thoughts, please comment below.