SEO Scaleup: How Outsourcing Can Help Your Business Grow
In the fast-paced world of modern business, often the key to long-term success lies in flexibility and your team’s readiness to adapt to changing demands. Occasionally, business owners can feel a responsibility to manage all aspects of their operations single-handedly, but as companies scale and responsibilities grow, even the most driven leaders may find themselves overworked.
There’s no shame in bringing on extra hands to streamline essential processes, in fact, 68% of US consumer products companies outsource some of their duties to third-party entities. Though for scaling businesses the real challenge is often working out where outsourcing is best applied.
To help growing organizations alleviate some pressure and ensure that key resources are used appropriately and efficiently, it can be wise to delegate a few tasks to third-party professionals. For those interested, this short guide will cover how outsourcing can help your business grow.
What is outsourcing?
Outsourcing simply describes the process of hiring a third-party company to provide specialized services for an agreed duration and a preapproved price. Typically, business owners will choose to outsource key tasks to contractors, freelancers or businesses specializing in specific services to provide assistance to in-house teams, and to free up resources during periods of growth.
Choosing to outsource some duties to third-parties can help scaling businesses to avoid things like employee burnout and missed deadlines, especially if the business has limited access to professionals with specialized skill sets. Outsourcing tasks like marketing and logistics during periods of growth allows teams to keep working even when long-term recruitment isn’t possible.
What tasks are commonly outsourced?
For small businesses and scaling companies, outsourcing enables in-house teams to focus on their strengths by ensuring common administrative and management tasks are performed by professionals. Typically, duties such as accounting, IT management, marketing and logistics will be prioritized, helping companies meet demands without overburdening existing internal teams.
Accounting
Accounting is a critical function for businesses of any size, but as companies grow accounting processes can become increasingly complex. As your accounting department will be central to the success of your brand, selecting the right candidates for full-time positions should be subject to a lengthy recruitment process, but scaling brands often lack the time or funds to achieve this.
By outsourcing key financial services like invoicing, tax filing and bookkeeping to a third-party agency, growing businesses can ensure these tasks are completed professionally, and at a reduced cost compared to the expense of hiring and onboarding full-time in-house accountants.
Human resources
As businesses grow and employees take on more responsibilities, HR departments must keep up with increasingly heavy workloads managing aspects like payroll, benefits and compliance with industry-specific regulations. As scaling businesses will often not have access to the funds required to hire new staff, outsourcing HR management tasks can be a cost-effective solution.
Marketing
Clear, consistent and well-researched marketing campaigns will help businesses to reach new clients and achieve growth targets, though there’s a big difference between good marketing and bad marketing, with effective campaigns requiring detailed planning and professional expertise.
In the modern world, teams must develop multifaceted strategies encompassing social media, videos, search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing and much more, with each aspect requiring specialized skills and a large time investment. By outsourcing link building, social media marketing and SEO tasks to professionals, teams can avoid costly marketing mistakes.
The benefits of outsourcing SEO
Developing and implementing an effective SEO strategy can be a particularly time-consuming and resource-draining pursuit for teams lacking specialized marketing skill sets. Though SEO may seem like a simple process from afar, creating content that places your businesses above the competition within crowded markets will require significant time and resource investments.
SEO remains one of the most important aspects of marketing for scaling businesses, with data indicating over 50% of consumers research products online before making a purchase, while around 50% of marketers claim organic search provides the best ROI of any marketing channel.
For small businesses and entrepreneurs already faced with mounting workloads during periods of growth, outsourcing SEO and related digital marketing tasks can enable teams to focus on day-to-day operations while still benefiting from organic online growth. Further benefits include:
Cost savings
Outsourcing individual SEO tasks to freelancers can result in significant cost savings, primarily as the cost of hiring an agency to perform itemized tasks will be much lower than hiring, training and maintaining an in-house team. Sourcing agencies with in-depth knowledge of your industry will also allow scaling teams to benefit from years of expertise when crafting marketing content.
Additionally, outsourcing SEO will enable companies to avoid the cost of investing in specialized technologies and analytics tools, most of which can be expensive and difficult to operate without prior training. SEO and related marketing tasks will also be performed much more efficiently and will be more likely to be immediately effective, contributing to productivity-related cost savings.
Improved ROI
When managed and executed by trained professionals, SEO services can bring significant ROI benefits to scaling companies. Research shows SEO-generated leads have a 14.6% conversion rate, far greater than traditional outbound marketing methods with only a 1.7% rate. Increasing organic traffic and converting leads via expert SEO services can quickly result in improved ROI.
Increased lead quality
SEO professionals working for well-respected third-party agencies will possess the necessary experience to prioritize high-quality industry-specific leads. This means your lead generation strategy will be optimized to concentrate on the prospects most likely to generate measurable growth, reducing the likelihood of teams wasting time and resources on potential dead-ends.
Scalability and flexibility
Managing growth in any industry can be unpredictable, meaning marketing teams must be able to adapt to changing demands promptly. Professional agencies will be well-positioned to scale their efforts based on both current demands and data-informed forecasts, ensuring that teams make efficient and effective use of limited resources to save costs while maintaining growth.
Summary
Effectively managing periods of growth will often place significant strains on small businesses, with existing teams expected to shoulder the weight of mounting tasks and responsibilities. Rather than risk the negative impacts of burnout and missed deadlines, business leaders should explore the benefits of outsourcing key tasks to third-party professionals and trusted agencies.
By outsourcing specialized tasks such as marketing to external professionals, businesses gain invaluable expertise and insights to better manage periods of growth, while avoiding the costs of hiring and training permanent staff. Expenses can be easily managed as duration and costs are preapproved, and the experience can help to inform long-term hiring requirements for the future.
