Once you reach a certain size, you need a dedicated marketing team. Your executive team, your sales team, that intern finishing up their semester—not only do they all have better things to do with their time, but they also don’t have the full expertise required to properly develop and roll out a marketing strategy. In the enVisioning Success podcast episode, Empowering Your Team: Managing and Expanding Capacity for Avatar-centric Service, co-hosts Laura and Julia talk about the trust required when hiring new staff. In this article, we’re going to look at the same kind of trust needed in hiring an outsourced marketing firm.

Outsourced Marketing as a Partnership, Not a Vendor

If you’ve had experience with outsourced marketing before, it’s most likely with a company acting as a marketing vendor—providing you a “product”—a new website, lead generation, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or something similarly packaged. And packaged is the operative word: these services are often fixed and your communication with these companies is handled similarly. Instead, you need to approach outsourcing your marketing as a strategic partnership—working with a marketing firm that functions like a department within your company. Learn more about the differences in our blog, A Marketing Vendor Versus a Marketing Partner.

Establish Marketing Strategy Alongside Business Strategy

The best part of such a partnership is the comprehensive nature of the marketing. By analyzing your business, its place in the industry, and the marketing landscape, they can create marketing plans that complement your current business strategy, shoring up where you are weak and further enhancing where you are strong. Some examples include:

• Getting integrated with your sales team to provide better lead generation.
• Building out the marketing demographics behind your most profitable customers.
• Freeing up your staff from doing marketing, allowing them to spend their limited resources better.
• Using multi-channel marketing to reach your customers anywhere on the internet.

About the enVisioning Success Podcast

This article is based on topics discussed in enVisioning Success, our weekly podcast hosted by Vision Advertising CEO Laura DiBenedetto and COO Julia Becker Collins. In it, they discuss all things business and marketing, from lead generation to leadership. Find us on PodBean to download from your platform of choice, or subscribe to our mailing list to get new episodes and other news delivered directly to your inbox. Interested in working with Vision Advertising? Learn more about our services and contact us today.