How to Efficiently Manage Your Outsourced Marketing Team

Outsourcing your marketing initiatives comes with several benefits. Even large organizations have to hire external agencies to handle specific marketing campaigns. However, you’ll need an efficient strategy to ensure that your remote team is performing and delivering quality results. In this article, we’ll show you how you can efficiently manage your outsourced marketing team.

An in-house team can deplete a startup’s budget as employee remunerations and benefits could make up a tall order.

It makes even more sense to outsource when you look at the benefits. You can:

• Have more time to handle other crucial business dealings
• Hire from a rich, broader talent pool
• Save costs

Deloitte’s 2020 Global Outsourcing survey reported that companies embraced outsourcing because it helped save costs.

All that said, hiring freelancers could backfire if you don’t know how to manage them. Granted, outsourced experts are talented professionals. However, you still have to fine-tune their work mode to meet your brand’s needs.

This article covers tips on how to efficiently manage an outsourced team.

How do you Manage Outsourced Staff?

There’s no single model for managing outsourced marketing teams. Instead, your process has to be streamlined to your business. That said, there are principles you must follow to get things right. Let’s walk you through each.

Hiring the Right Professionals Comes First

One of the most important roles of a manager is gathering the right team. So, hiring the right freelancers or agency should be a priority. You don’t want to organize a team and regret it later.

Ensure you go through each freelancer’s portfolio and peruse client testimonials. However, it shouldn’t end there. First, put them through tests before you onboard them.

An agency’s clientele should tell you how good they are. If you have the budget for that, you have to research their track record, and if possible, interview some of their clients.

Chalk out your Objectives

Everyone should understand the goals of the project in clear terms. Whether you’re hiring an agency or a team of freelancers, make sure they fully grasp the scope of the work during the recruitment process.

That said, you shouldn’t just point at a single goal and rest on your laurels. For example, telling an agency that you want to increase leads won’t do any good. Instead, you need to lay out the numbers and facts in fine detail. Let them know how much ROI you’re looking at, the type of leads you want, conversion rates, and when you want things to happen.

It would be best if you made your goals quantifiable. This way, you can track your outsourced marketing team’s progress.

Assign Roles

Determining how your outsourced experts work with your in-house team is one of the great things about outsourcing. First, however, confirm you’re making the right decisions.

For example, you may want to restrict specific aspects of your business for security reasons.

However, before you do that, you should understand the need for your marketing team to get the information they need to run the campaign. Restricting certain info could cause problems. So, you have to weigh the pros and cons before making any decision.

That is why it is vital to define who gets access to what. For instance, you could build layers of access between your in-house team and the freelancers.

After that, make sure every freelancer understands their role. Now, this should be made clear during the recruitment process. You don’t want to micromanage your marketing campaigns as you need time for other high-level business situations.

You’re primarily hiring freelancers due to their areas of specialization. So, double-check that their roles correspond with their skills.

If your business is big enough to hire a marketing agency, things will be a lot easier. In this case, you only have to communicate your marketing objectives and what you want to achieve. However, that doesn’t mean there should be a disconnect between the agency and your in-house team. You can assign a team member to collaborate with the agency.

Communicate

Trusting freelancers to do their jobs because they are experts doesn’t mean they should work independently of your brand. Without proper communication, the entire marketing process could easily fall apart.

Telecommuting comes with communication challenges. For example, workers could operate in silos without an effective collaboration strategy.

According to a study that interviewed more than 61,000 Microsoft employees, remote workers are likely to be siloed, having to spend fewer hours in meetings.

So, you have to ensure your workers are briefed about communication. Set up regular meetings that help them synergize without wasting their time. Encourage consultations throughout the workflow. What’s more, make sure tools are readily available to aid communication. These include messaging apps and video conference platforms.

Avoid Micromanagement

Hiring the right professionals for the job means you can rest easy that it’ll be executed well. Thankfully, one of the benefits of outsourcing marketing services is that you can hire the best of the best.

Now, micromanaging a professional means you’re getting in the way of their work. Telling them what to do and how to do it kills the work mood and can have severe ramifications for your business. Workers will become uncomfortable working for you, and your workplace will gradually become toxic.

Everyone has a method that works for them. That’s why whoever you’re hiring must have glowing reviews. So, trust them to get things their way.