To help small businesses decide whether or not to outsource, we asked small business owners and marketing professionals this question for their best insights. From owning your content to having peace of mind, there are several considerations that may help your small business decide whether or not to outsource marketing efforts.Here are 12 considerations for outsourcing your marketing efforts:

• Own Your Content

• Free Up Your Time for Other Parts of Your Business

• Gain Access to Marketing Tools and Resources

• Boost Your Competitive Advantage

• Improve Tracking and Monitoring

• Get Industry Expertise

• Save Time and Money

• Find Engaging Storytellers for Your Brand

• Fill in the Specialized Knowledge that You Don’t Have

• Risk of Confidentiality Breach

• Consider Bandwidth and Expertise

• Peace of Mind

Own Your Content

One reason to keep your marketing in-house is that you get to own and control your content. By having real ownership of your content you can easily reuse and revamp old content to suit your marketing needs in the future.

Loren Howard, Prime Plus Mortgages: Real Estate Note Investing

Free Up Your Time for Other Parts of Your Business

When you outsource marketing efforts, you are freeing up a significant amount of time for other aspects of your business. You can't be an expert in everything, and there are only so many hours in a day anyway. By outsourcing some things like marketing to the experts, you can focus on developing relationships with customers and providing the best products or services possible.

Jennifer Klemmetson, Klemmetson Communications

Gain Access to Marketing Tools and Resources

When you outsource your marketing efforts, you're getting a lot in exchange for your money. Agencies are staffed by experienced marketers who have their fingers on the pulse of current trends. They can open your eyes to new possibilities and help you make contact with different demographics. The tools they have at their disposal are essentially at your disposal, enabling you to make the most of your marketing budget.

Carey Wilbur, Charter Capital

Boost Your Competitive Advantage

Would you rather have one employee on staff whose only job is marketing, or have access to a whole agency staffed with marketing experts? For me, it's the latter, since the boost to my competitive advantage is clear. With one employee, you're limited to one person's ideas, but when you outsource your marketing efforts, you have a whole team of experienced marketers working to get your name out there.

Randall Smalley, Cruise America

Improve Tracking and Monitoring

Taking on the responsibility of marketing yourself means setting aside time to keep track of your efforts. With all of the other responsibilities that come with the day-to-day operations of running a small business, your time would be better spent on other tasks. When you outsource your marketing efforts, you shift that responsibility to the experts. It will be their job to implement, track, monitor, and make sense of marketing efforts for you.

Vanessa Molica, The Lash Professional

Get Industry Expertise

When marketing on your own, you're limited to what you know, and you may know more about insurance than marketing. If you don't get the results you want, it can be frustrating. Outsourcing your marketing efforts, however, lets you take advantage of what others know. You get access to marketing expertise and experience you don't have yourself when you outsource your marketing efforts. 

Chris Abrams, Marcan Insurance

Save Time and Money

If you take responsibility for your own marketing efforts, it will take up too much time. If you hire someone to handle marketing for you in-house, you're going to spend a lot on their salary and potentially only see a small return on that investment. Instead, you can save both time and money by outsourcing marketing to an agency. It costs less to hire an agency, and you can keep your focus where it belongs –– on running your business.

Brandon Berglund, Berglund Insurance

Find Engaging Storytellers for Your Brand

One of the main reasons to outsource marketing efforts is so you can find a firm with a pool of talented copywriters who can create engaging stories around your brand and attract more readers and clients.With a creative and engaging backstory, you can be sure that your targeted audiences will perceive your business much more positively. Great copywriting and storytelling makes all the difference and sometimes become a brand in itself (just think Durex or Coca-Cola).

Natalia Brzezinska, PhotoAiD

Fill in the Specialized Knowledge that You Don’t Have

Effective marketing is anything but easy, there are a lot of things that you need to think deeply about like strategies, running advertising campaigns, making and optimizing websites, and so on. Sure, you can master them all by yourself, but as the business owner who’s managing and running the business itself, do you really have the time and energy to do that? I know I don’t. That’s why if you want your business to flourish, you need to up your marketing efforts by hiring or acquiring talents (marketing specialists) that will help you fill that “marketing knowledge gap” and work on all the marketing efforts so that you can focus your time and energy to other things — whether its for business expansion or simply to spend time with yourself and your family.

James Wilkinson, Balance One Supplements

Risk of Confidentiality Breach

The fact that so many companies are offering comprehensive marketing solutions these days means that it has never been easier to share information online without realizing the consequences of doing so. It only takes one misstep for an entire project to jeopardize if someone else obtains it. Your marketing partner may include security measures in place, but there are no guarantees. Many businesses have fallen prey to hackers who break through firewalls and gain access to sensitive information in their databases. Each year, there are several successful hacking cases involving companies outsourcing to other countries where they cannot control the security measure process or guarantee confidentiality.

Marc De Diego Ferrer, MCA Assessors

Consider Bandwidth and Expertise 

Outsourcing is recommended when eitherA) You simply don't have the bandwidth but have a clear templatable approach for another team to take onB) When it is NOT core to what you are best at. For example, if you need Technical SEO help for specific project support and you have only a team of content writers. It is not worth the uphill battle of training someone to learn this skill who may not be as proficient and you don't need a full-time person.This aligns with when NOT to outsource which is whatever your best at, scale that element in-house. You can find ways to automate work or pass work off to junior team members but this is where the rubber meets the road.

Daniel Kamen, Serial Scaling

Peace of Mind

One of the most crucial reasons a small business should outsource marketing efforts is the peace of mind the move can offer the entrepreneur. Any of us who has managed or even worked in a small business know how stressful it can be. The constant worrying, the stressful situations, and the need to do everything at once do create an adverse impact. On the other hand, outsourcing the all-important element of marketing helps a business owner breathe easily, knowing that this particular task is bound to provide outstanding results in the hands of professionals.

Azmaira Maker, Ph.D., Aspiring Families

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