Many businesses use outsourced marketing services as a temporary solution before they’re ready to bring marketing in-house. However, not every agency enables you to do this. If your goal is to have your own marketing department one day, then you want an agency who will help you to build your infrastructure and capabilities and establish best practices. Not one who hoards their IP to cultivate your reliance on them.

As an outsourced marketing agency that works primarily with startups and scaleups, we know many of our clients will eventually move on. That’s why our aim is always to give them the tools they need to run their own marketing activity after we leave.

Here are some of the services you should look for if this is also your aim, and how they can help you.

Brand guidelines

In our opinion, all outsourced marketing services should start with agreed brand guidelines. If these aren’t something you already have, your agency should create them for you.

This is your marketing and brand bible. It defines who you are, what you look like, how you market yourself, who to, and with what language.

Not only does this make sure everything is consistent while you work together, but it gives you a clear guide to support any new in-house marketing hires.

This could include:

• Logos (in multiple formats)
• Colour palettes
• Typography
• Design guidelines (such as when to use what type of logo)
• Company messaging
  • Value proposition
  • Strapline
  • Values
  • Elevator pitch
  • What we do summary
• Target audience
• Tone of voice
• Language
• Stylistic rules (such as when to use capitalisation)
• Communication themes
• And so on!

As part of these brand guidelines, you may also expect to get ready-to-use templates. For example, a deck of various PowerPoint slide styles in company branding. Or Word documents with company headers and blank structures.

Explore outsourced marketing strategy services here.

Marketing processes & best practices

Even if the plan isn’t to pass marketing activity over to an in-house team, your agency should always be instilling best practice into your ways of working.

A good team will establish a clear process from the start. The more open they are about how they’ve created something, or the more collaborative the process, the easier it will be for you to replicate it when they’re gone.

Equally, they should be communicating what best practice is throughout their work. For example, justifying why they’ve made certain decisions or created things a certain way based on industry standards of what works.

Better yet, this should be detailed in regular reports that present the data to back up their decisions.

Answer all your outsourced marketing questions with this blog

Marketing training & mentoring

Some digital marketing agencies will provide marketing training, or marketing mentoring. This can be focused on the marketing services that are your priority, and be deeply technical, or more strategic. For example, you may want to understand the process of creating a content strategy – what to research, how to target buyers, and how to come up with relevant ideas.  

Or you may want to learn the practical skills needed to manage a social media account. For example, reporting, designing on Canva, copywriting, choosing hashtags, automating posting, and so on.  

If you’ve already been working with the agency you want mentoring from, you should know which digital marketing services you should focus your attention on.

Here are some examples of the training we can provide: 

• Marketing strategy 
  • How to develop a brand and marketing strategy 
  • How to implement and management a marketing activity plan 
• Content marketing 
  • Creating a content marketing strategy 
  • Structuring and writing a blog 
• Social media 
  • Creating a social media calendar 
  • Posting best practices  
  • How to set up a LinkedIn campaign 
• Ads and PPC 
  • How to set up Google Ads 
  • Planning and writing best practices  
• And more! 

You may also like this blog, where a client of ours shares her experience of strategic marketing mentoring and what she found valuable.

CRM implementation

A HubSpot onboarding partner, or other CRM partner, can organise your solution in a way that supports your marketing and sales activity long-term.

• First, the set up. A HubSpot partner will set up your platform to reduce potential issues down the line and make sure you can easily manage and evolve it yourself. For example, by migrating and organising data properly, or creating a long-term user management strategy.
• Next, automation and workflows. Your HubSpot partner will implement workflows that streamline your operations, align with best-practice marketing processes, and connect these processes to your sales operations. Taking this one step further, they can automate workflows so that your marketing activity is running seamlessly, without input.
• Finally, training. Some agencies will also offer extended training and knowledge sharing programmes to empower your team to keep HubSpot moving forwards. This includes strategic guidance, but also practical documentation about processes.

READ MORE: Is a HubSpot onboarding partner worth It?

Explore outsourced marketing solutions

Grow your positive impact with our outsourced marketing packages, designed to set you up for long-term success, even after we’re gone.

Outsourced marketing FAQs

What’s the benefit of outsourced marketing vs hiring my own team?

There are merits to both options, but here are the reasons you may want to outsource marketing services versus hire your own in-house team:

1. Cost & resource

Marketing is a suite of services and tools, not one thing. To establish a complete marketing function internally, you will need to hire multiple different people and specialties. The costs of this can quickly rack up. In fact, outsourcing vs hiring can save you over £200,000 a year.

Your alternative is to hire a few all-rounders, but the quality and frequency of output may not be as high.

2. Best practices 

A marketing agency can provide insight, tools, and learnings you might not have internally. As an expertly trained group, with experience of what works and what doesn’t, they will be able to implement best-practice tactics that improve your results. 

3. Skillsets 

You get a wide range of skillsets and perspectives when you hire an outsourced marketing agency. They can provide you with agile support in design, content, strategy, operations management, or whatever it is you need as your priorities change.

What type of digital marketing services can be outsourced?

In short, anything! What digital marketing services do you want? You’ll be able to find an agency that either specialises in it, or a full-service agency that offers it. For example, paid media marketing and PPC, or SEO marketing, are common specialties.

Whereas a full-service marketing agency might offer everything from social media marketing to content writing to design.

How would an outsourced marketing agency work with my marketing team?

An outsourced agency can augment your internal team’s capabilities. They provide specialist skills, additional resource, and a new strategic perspective. Our tips for working with an agency effectively include:

• Define and share responsibilities from the start.
• Contribute your respective expertise. Them; marketing, you; industry insight.
• Treat your agency like a trusted team member, including things like inviting them into internal meetings and giving them some autonomy.

See more tips for working with a marketing agency here.

How do I determine a budget with a marketing agency?

First, understand the total potential budget you have available with your finance team. You can use industry averages to gauge what’s reasonable too. Next, define your commercial goals, how far from achieving these you are, and how quickly you want to achieve them.

This will give you and your agency a better idea of how much you need to spend. I.e. faster = more expensive.

Once you have an overall budget, you can work with your marketing agency to allocate this budget to specific marketing services. Read more about how to do this here.