According to HubSpot, almost 60% of companies get third-party marketing support. This highlights just how commonplace outsourced marketing efforts have become. 

But what are outsourced marketing services, why should you consider them, when is it time to do so, and what are your options?  

Keep reading to find the answers to the following questions: 

• What is marketing outsourcing? 

• What is an outsourced agency? 

• What are the benefits? 

• Marketing case studies

• When should I outsource my marketing? 

• Outsourced marketing vs in-house 

• What does it take to run an in-house marketing team? 

• Is outsourcing cheaper? 

• How much does it cost? 

 

What is marketing outsourcing?

Outsourcing is hiring an external team to take care of your marketing activity. 

You may decide to give a third-party full control. Or, you may opt for a hybrid approach. With a hybrid approach, you’ll split the responsibilities between you. The right option for you depends on your objectives, budget, and level of expertise. 

Get tips on how to set a budget with your agency in this blog. 

When it comes to hiring a third party, you have multiple options. Firstly, you could hire a full-service agency to take care of all areas of your marketing, from your strategic planning to your day-to-day activities. This is generally more common with early-stage companies who don’t yet have their own department.

Alternatively, you could look for specialties to add to your internal skillset. As of 2024, some of the biggest skills gaps were data and analytics, performance marketing, and content and copywriting. If you’ve identified a gap like this in your own team, you might decide to hire a company who can lend some targeted support.  

What is an outsourced marketing agency?

An outsourced marketing company is a team of specialists who are external to your business. They are an alternative to hiring an internal marketing team.

Everyone’s approach is different, but their main aim will be to support you with the services you don’t have the time, tools, or expertise to handle in-house.  

Some companies will simply take a brief, create assets, and deliver them to you. Others will act like your in-house team, getting to know the ins and outs of your brand, communicating with you regularly, handling everything from planning to creation to delivery, and reporting on your progress. 

The agency you choose will depend on the level of service you’re looking for.  

If you’re looking for a team to support you, you might find Tips for choosing the best digital marketing agency for you helpful.

Meet our team

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What are the benefits? 

Outsourcing can have many strategic, financial, and resourcing benefits – no matter where you are in your business’s growth journey. 

For example, say you’re just starting out. An external marketing team could help you distil your offering into messaging that resonates with your target audience. On the other hand, if you’re a large business, you may be ready to enter a new market. An agency could help you launch a localised strategy with confidence. 

Explore all the benefits of working with a partner in our guide.

For now, here are some of the main ones: 

1. Access to expertise.

Very few people will have all the skills needed to plan, launch, manage, and monitor their activity. But when you work with an agency, you get access to a range of skills, trained experts, and fresh strategic perspectives.   

Depending on your requirements, you might decide to hire a specialised agency or a full-service agency. A specialised agency will provide laser-focused support in one area, such as email marketing or pay-per-click. In contrast, a full-service agency will take a broader approach to brand building and be able to meet all your needs.

With both agency options, you’ll get access to a larger team for the same cost as hiring for some senior marketing roles.

Compare the costs for yourself with our calculator.

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2. MarTech and infrastructure.

The tools and infrastructure needed to launch a new brand or manage ongoing activity can be expensive to run and confusing to learn. From data analytics platforms to design tools, you’ll need a suite of technologies to help you achieve (and track) the results you want. 

With an outsourced company, the onus won’t be on you to buy and use these tools. You’ll have a team of people who have spent time curating an effective MarTech suite, and have each tool set up already.

3. Best practices and processes.

From the ‘best’ messages to engage buyers, to the ‘right’ way to optimise your content for SEO, keeping up with what’s most effective can feel like a full-time job! When you outsource to an agency, you can be confident in the fact they’ve made it theirs.  

It’ll be their responsibility to keep up to date with industry trends, customer behaviour, platform algorithm updates, and more – so you don’t have to. 

You can find a more in-depth list of what it takes to launch a successful marketing campaign in our Outsourced marketing vs In-house: resources and processes guide.

4. Flexible support that helps you grow.

An agency can get started quickly, because they have the processes in place. You should get a realistic timeline of activity, based on their resource and industry knowledge. 

Their main goal will be to help your business grow – in the way you want. This might be by creating content to nurture leads, or developing pitch decks that impress investors. 

Many agencies will also give you the tools to set up processes long-term. So, you can continue scaling even after your contract ends! Here’s what to look for if your goal is to eventually build your own internal marketing team.

Marketing agency case studies

We’ve helped startups, scaleups and larger enterprises reach their commercial goals. Explore our portfolio and see for yourself what kind of impact outsourced marketing can have.

Download our Marketing Portfolio

When should I outsource my marketing?

Every business will see different clues that it’s time to get support. However, here are three circumstances that might feel familiar if you’re ready to take on some outside help: 

1. You can’t afford to hire a team.

Hiring an in-house team can cost upwards of £410,000 (based on one hire per specialty). This is a huge figure, and one that many businesses can’t justify.  

When you outsource your marketing, you won’t need to hire a full team of content writers, social media managers, designers, web developers, strategists, and more. You’ll have a team ready to go, at a fraction of the cost. 

Explore the cost savings you could achieve by outsourcing in this guide. Download it for free now.

2. Your strategic objectives aren’t clear.

If you don’t have a clear-cut strategy, it’s going to be challenging for your teams to join forces to achieve it. You might be trying to create things that don’t bring value to your sales team, or that your stakeholders don’t feel compelled to get behind. 

When you outsource your marketing to an agency, you’ll have a streamlined team of people who understand the ins and outs of your strategy. Everyone will be singing from the same hymn sheet to achieve the results you’re looking for. 

3. You aren’t getting the results you wanted.

It’s not uncommon for brands to spend money on a paid media campaign that wasn’t worth the investment, or an SEO strategy that didn’t attract the right traffic.  

An agency, however, will be able to help you set objectives that are realistic, within your budget, and aligned with your commercial goals. They’ll also be able to help you track them and identify next steps if something’s not working.  

In When should you outsource digital marketing to an agency?, we explore more tell-tale signs that your in-house team needs some extra support.

Outsourced packages vs in-house.

What’s better? The answer is never going to be completely clear-cut, because every business has its own goals, preferences, budget, and requirements.  

However, considering what’s involved in creating a marketing strategy and plan can be a helpful way to decide if you’re better suited to an outsourced or in-house approach. 

Do you have the right infrastructure ready? 

For example, you’ll need: 

• Physical infrastructure for your marketing team (such as laptops) 

• Brand guidelines that keep you consistent, compliant, and commercially aligned 

• Best practices and established workflows that integrate all areas of marketing 

• A website and social media channels 

• Subscriptions to digital tools like HubSpot (CRM), Semrush, and Adobe Photoshop 

• Analytics tools set up and embedded into your website, such as Google Analytics and UTM tracking codes 

Will you have capacity to manage your own processes? 

A lot more than you might think goes into publishing even one campaign. For example, a single design needs to be briefed, created, proofed, updated, adjusted for different channels, and made live. So, to run a complete omnichannel campaign, you’ll need to do much more: 

• Conduct in-depth competitor, audience, and market research 

• Identify the right key performance indicators (KPIs) and how to track them 

• Decide on marketing budgets and campaign timelines  

• Turn everything you’ve learned into a strategy, and then into an actionable plan 

• Create your main asset, for example a new product brochure or a report 

• Create all the supporting assets needed to promote the main one, such as designed social posts, Google ads, email outreach, blogs, and landing pages 
• Measure your campaign performance to keep improving 

It’s no surprise that ‘not enough in-house expertise’ and ‘not enough in-house resources’ are the two biggest drivers for companies that outsource. 

Of course, if you already have all of these resources and processes in place, then you might be primed to take your marketing in-house. However, if you’d be starting from scratch, then it may be more efficient to work with agency that has everything set up already.  

A summary of the main differences in approaches

	Full-service agency	Fractional CMO	Specialist freelancer	Hiring an in-house team
Cost	Complete team for the cost of one hire	A senior-level salary	An hourly salary and ad hoc costs	A large investment into annual salaries
Processes	Established best practices and workflows	Will combine their processes with yours	Will combine their processes with yours	You’ll need to create your own processes
Tech	Already have a digital infrastructure	Niche tech, or will need access to yours	Niche tech, or will need access to yours	You’ll need to invest in your own technology
Skills	Access to full range of skills and experts	Strategy and management skills	Focused specialist skills	Dependent on hiring, budget and training
Resource agility	Agile delivery and quick to scale resource	Lacks operational and delivery capacity	Limited resource as an individual	Agile delivery but takes time to hire new talent

To continue weighing up your options, our Outsourced marketing vs In-house: resources and processes guide is full of helpful tips. Or you may like the blog ‘Do I need a fractional CMO or outsourced marketing?‘ 

What does it take to run an internal team?

As you scale, you might decide to bring some, or all, of your activity in-house. If this is the case, here are some of the key steps you’ll need to take.  

1. Build your marketing strategy.

Your strategy steers your long-term efforts and defines who you are as a brand. When you take things in-house, you’ll need to make sure you refine this strategy as the market changes, your customers’ behaviours evolve, and you scale further.  

This means regularly reviewing everything from your company messaging to your buyer personas to your KPIs and metrics.   

2. Choose a focus.

It’s a good idea not to spread yourself too thin, even if you have a large, multi-skilled marketing department. Think about your objectives in detail before identifying which channels and techniques are the best suited to help you achieve them.  

For instance, if your goal is to generate leads, then you might consider sharing lead magnets across your social channels, or launching email workflows that nurture prospects from awareness to decision. 

3. Create a long-term marketing plan.

By looking ahead, you can create a plan that consistently helps you achieve your goals – instead of deciding what to deliver on the fly. A long-term plan doesn’t mean you need to decide on every detail months in advance; it’s simply a core framework that will keep you and your team on track.  

This might be a 6-12-month plan that outlines the journey you want to take prospects on, the content you’ll need to do so, and the KPIs you’d like to see each quarter.  

For more tips like these, check out Top tips for bringing your marketing in-house. Or, see which agency services can help you do it yourself.

Is outsourcing cheaper?

Outsourcing can be significantly cheaper than hiring an in-house team.  

In fact, we found that hiring a full, in-house marketing team could cost businesses more than £410,000 per year. This is when you consider the average salary of a marketing manager, digital executive, content writer, graphic designer, and more.

When you hire an outsourced marketing agency, you’ll simply pay a monthly fee, with the option to scale up and down as your business grows.  

If you want to add a service to your contract – such as social media management, for instance – your agency will most likely have a range of packages for you to choose from. You won’t need to spend money hiring a social media manager or purchasing all the subscriptions they need to do their job well.

Compare the costs of hiring in-house vs an outsourced agency

How much does an agency cost? 

What it costs to will depend on a variety of factors, such as: 

• The partner you choose 

• Your business growth goals  

• The services you need to achieve them 

As an example, however, our outsourced marketing services start from £6,000 per month (£72,000 per annum). 

Every agency will be slightly different, so it’s always best to contact them directly to ask about their costs in more detail. 

Read more about how to set a budget with your partner.

Discover the benefits of outsourced marketing   

To learn more about the benefits of working with an external team, check out our guide The benefits of outsourced marketing compared to in-house.