Outsourcing Internet Marketing Services

Outsourcing internet marketing services is not a new trend, yet many people are unaware of its potential. There is a lot of uncertainty and scepticism about outsourcing, what many believe to be, a function that should be kept in house. However, there are certain parts of your internet marketing campaign that can be safely outsourced and this article discusses a few of them.

Which Internet Marketing services can you outsource?

Which Internet Marketing services can you safely outsource? As you are considering this option, some of the questions that might need to be answered would be:

• Would my outsourcing partner have the skills to do this?
• Can I reap immediate financial benefit from this?
• How do I interact with my outsourcing vendor through the lifecycle of the project?

One way of finding the answers is to look at the nature of the service itself. The following are some of the conditions that can determine if a particular service is easy to outsource.

• It should be possible to conceptualize, define and execute the service with the limitation of interacting only over telephone and email.
• The service fee should be in the range of a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars.
• The region where the service is going to be outsourced should be known to possess the skills required to implement the service.
• The service should, by nature, require intense human effort and be difficult to automate.
• The service should require people with specific skills and knowledge to implement it.
• It should be easy to monitor the results of this service.

These are some of the services that can be easily outsourced.

Internet Marketing Strategy and Consulting

This is the first on the list since this could be the most controversial. Here is our reason why you should offload part of this to India.

Companies in India are increasingly depending on the internet to acquire customers over the web. For the majority, opening an office in the US or Europe is not feasible. So they have adapted themselves to become the masters of this medium. A lot of people here are well versed with the web and specifically how to market services and products on the web. You could benefit from this understanding. Another good thing is that an Indian company might be willing to provide consultancy as part of their other marketing services.

Search engine marketing (SEM)

The objective of this service is to use search engines to drive traffic to your website. By its very nature, SEM is resource intensive. Most of the directories and search engines don't approve of automatic submissions. They prefer manual submission where a person submits a site for approval.

To implement SEM in-house requires someone to read up on the tips and tricks and constantly be at it. But then it's not large enough to hire a full time person. Outsourcing this service to professional Internet marketing firm could get you started immediately with very little investment.

However, on a cautionary note, always insist on knowing the way your outsourcing partner implements this service. The industry is full of individuals and companies who spam the search engines for quick results. You would not want to get your website blacklisted by dealing with these companies.

Link building

This service is closely associated with SEM. Link building requires someone to continuously write to webmasters and requesting them to link to your website. Doing it the right way can take up a considerable amount of time.
Link building starts with figuring out why people should link to your website. It then goes all the way to procuring links from other website. The whole exercise can be very time consuming. This service in our opinion is easy to monitor, easy to measure and easy to outsource.

Web Analytics

Using data to make a decision is one thing, but spending time to collect that data is a different ball game altogether. Web analytics is a service where your vendor is responsible for collecting and analyzing data and making suggestions to you based on the analysis. It makes sense for you, as a business owner, to spend time looking at data and even reports rather than spending time in collecting this information.

Newsletter Campaign

Newsletters are still known to be effective, in spite of the spam menace. Churning out a newsletter every two weeks or every month requires a few things - a system to collect emails, content, a good design, a tool or service to send emails and a system to monitor the effectiveness of the newsletter. So the kinds of skills you are looking at are writing, design and some technology skills. In our opinion, outsourcing this task can make your newsletter campaign extremely effective.

Promotional Writing

As things stand now, content is the king in website marketing. If you want your website to do well, be prepared to invest in original and persuasive quality content. Outsourcing your content to a professional writer could give you immediate benefits. A writer can use your existing website content, your brochure, memos, telephone conversation, emails, etc to either tweak an existing article or produce an original one.