6 Tips for Outsourcing Your Internet Marketing
If you decide to get outside help with your Internet marketing, here are a few ideas to consider before deciding which outsourcer is best for you:
- Ask for references, ask to see their work, and ask to read reviews.
- Ask for a list of deliverables and approximately how long each takes.
- Ask about any other services the company offers and how strong their focus is in the areas you are interested in.
- Make sure you know what is outsourced and what is done in-house.
- Ask which people on their team do what parts of the job so you can be sure they actually have qualified people focusing on key tasks.
- Big or small, agency or webmaster, it is the hands-on experience that matters.
If you have a lot of time on your hands you can definitely learn a bit about do-it-yourself Internet marketing or you can focus on building content. A huge part of getting a keyword to end up on page one of Google search results is creating 100% original content for your website and for blogs (your own and other peoples’). Having people writing and creating content in-house can be a huge asset to you and your marketing team that can help promote your website and make it rank higher.
Another task that you can do in-house is appoint a community manager who responds to questions on your Facebook page and other social media platforms. Having a non-agency person with deep knowledge of your business available to engage with your customers can dramatically enhance an outside agency’s other strategies and tactics.
Don’t waste a big salary on a senior marketing executive who has only outdated skills. Senior strategists are great, especially when they “get it,” but dinosaurs are not useful unless they can write prolifically.
If you have interns or other non-experts work on your technical Internet marketing tasks, be aware they may get you banned from the search engines or social sites if they don’t understand the rules or if they do things that border on using “black hat” tactics. Again, the “easiest” thing to do yourself for search engine optimization or social media (and something that very few Internet marketing companies do well) is create lots of engaging content.
Think of your internal team and your marketing agency as parts of the same engine. You have to work in unison. Pointing fingers and just expecting the agency to go from zero to sixty on watered-down gas just doesn’t work. The days of easy web profits are gone and your humble help is needed, given the myriad tasks that Internet campaigns require. By making all cylinders align at the same time, you will get to your destination much more quickly.
How does your team split up the work and responsibilities?
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