What are the Pros of Outsourcing PR and Marketing Efforts?
In today’s borderless world, outsourcing your PR and marketing can be quite attractive! We all get the emails and phone calls every day from companies located in India, the Philippines, Africa, and South America telling us their services can be engaged, often for a fraction of the price it would cost us to have an American or Canadian professional write and implement a PR or marketing strategy and plan for your businesses. In some cases, this makes perfectly good business sense for many small businesses, large corporations, and everything in between. The lure of a significant cost reduction in expenses in these areas must be considered by any marketing and corporate PR desk, particularly when the boss is pressuring you to keep costs low and boost return on your marketing and advertising spend. Putting your head in the sand and hoping it will go away isn’t reality. Lowering your costs, while at the same time saving and reallocating valuable production time in house can well be worth the switch.
What are the Cons of Outsourcing PR/Marketing?
The obvious savings of both money and time, for many roles that are responsible for making this decision can be a no brainer, but what about the true cost? What’s the catch you might say or is there one? The short answer is it depends. For example if you are willing to spend the time vetting the various subcontractors and the companies behind them, their reputation for delivering, their ability to handle English fluently, both written, and oral as well as their skills for project management, communication and meeting deadlines then the answer is yes! Of course, you must make sure to add your time to the cost of the project to micromanage them, as well as lead the strategy, as its my experience in the last 23 years of using them and doing this type of work, that there will invariably be time required to do exactly this. In many cases, its much more than it would have been to do the job using local professionals, but it could still be worth your while. It’s all about the math and time, so make sure you keep track of this if you’re going to try it so you can compare the true expenses, and all this is before you even begin to track the campaign results. I think this is the true goal of such creative in the end. Often this gets completely overlooked with management focus on cost savings and price.
When Would You Recommend that a Small Business Outsource PR/Marketing?
Hmmmm, so what to do? My summary is, if you have simple project requirements that you already have the strategy and expertise on staff for, then this can be a solid option for many small businesses, but remember, you must provide clear instructions and the strategy for them and then manage its delivery and quality control yourself.
