In this blog post, discover...

Are you busy?

If you are a business owner reading this, then the chances are the answer is yes, you are busy - but let’s expand on that: Are you busily working on the right stuff?

It’s easy to get busy in the modern world. When you aren’t delivering to a customer, managing staff issues or doing sales and marketing activity there’s always finances and bookkeeping to manage or general admin stuff that’s outstanding. For the typical business owner, there’s even stuff on the list that will probably never actually get done!

At this point, you might be expecting some tips for how to prioritise what’s important and manage your lists of endless tasks better. There’s no top tips or discussion on to-do list management in this blog post. Instead, we are looking at a much more effective way to get results in your business… outsourcing.

Let’s understand the definition of outsourcing as well as how you can use it in your business and the benefits of outsourcing.​

As well as freeing up your time, outsourcing has another huge two-sided benefit.

It allows you to recruit expertise in an area that you aren’t strong in…

And it allows you to focus on what you are good at.

Let’s take a plan to outsource sales and marketing as an example.

As a business owner, you might be really good at designing and delivering the product or service that you provide to your customers. A manufacturer has expertise in making a great product while a personal fitness trainer provides a great service in helping clients stay fit and healthy.

Both the manufacturer and the fitness trainer have proven skills sets and knowledge in their respective areas of expertise, but neither of them might be any good at sales and marketing.

In fact, many business owners we talk to dislike the idea of selling and find the art of effective marketing to be overly complicated and tough. We can empathise with those feelings.

On the other hand, a marketing agency that delivers marketing campaigns and activities throughout the day and on a daily and weekly basis (and has done for years) should know how to get results out of marketing - whether that's support with email marketing, Google Ads or any other marketing activities.

Outsourced sales and marketing could be the perfect answer to a business that wants to grow its business while focusing on delivering great products, services and customer service.

Should the busy business owner try to learn in-depth how to do effective marketing, or should he or she outsource to an established expert that can fast-track results?

From a different perspective, for every hour a business owner works on a task such as bookkeeping or marketing, that’s an hour less that they can focus on what they do best.

There are only so many hours in a day and spending it on things that a business owner is not good at is lost time that could be spent on what they are good at.

When I graduated in International Business, a course that was very marketing focused, I went on to work for larger corporations in what could now be labelled traditional marketing. I accept that a lot has changed since then but what I learned and performed in terms of marketing included:

- Developing products and solutions that met the benefits of the customer
- Understanding customer needs and how the customers' mind works
- Integrating sales and marketing activities as a single unit
- Pricing a product inline with it's perceived value and in a way that maximises profit
- and much more!

The average social media marketer might not, for example, understand how the whole lead generation process should look, how power words such as 'now' or 'limited' make a difference, what the best colour is for a call to action button (orange is usually best) or that black conveys professionalism in artwork while blue conveys trust.

That's not to say that the marketer isn't smart, it's that focus is on how social media works and how content should be formatted and scheduled.

Marketing has required skills in many areas, so a video agency or an SEO expert isn't expected to understand how to develop a marketing strategy for a customer or why customers behave the way they do.

My book Psychology in Marketing and Sales discusses many other elements that marketing involves including the customer buyer journey, why we decide to buy a specific product or service and how we are influenced by different ways in which a product or service is positioned.

As a business grows, think twice about who you hire and how they can help. If you are serious about business growth then an expert in video, social media or email marketing (or SEO) should be considered, but having a marketing manager who looks at the bigger picture and brings the many marketing elements together should be a top priority!