Outsourcing your marketing without losing control of it

Outsourcing tends to be the right call when you have early signs that people want the product but nobody who knows marketing, when you need several channels running at once, or when you want evidence of what works before committing to a salary. Hiring tends to be right when marketing is a daily part of how you sell, when you need someone in the room with the product and sales teams every day, or when you already know which channel works and need depth in it.

The searches show where the question comes from. People in the US look for a marketing agency for startups far more often than people in the UK, while outsourced marketing as a phrase is searched about as often in both.

The cost comparison between a hire and outside help is worked through line by line on in-house marketing or an agency, and the case for hiring one freelancer is set out on a freelancer or a managed service. Both are worth reading before you decide, because the answer usually turns on breadth: how many channels need to run at the same time.

Keep three things inside the company however much you outsource. The customer conversations, because nobody outside hears what buyers say on sales calls. The positioning, meaning who the product is for and why it wins. And the final say on anything that goes out in your name.

The mix changes with the business. A SaaS startup usually needs sign-ups and demos, so search, landing pages and onboarding email come first; an online shop needs Meta and Google ads, product pages and abandoned-basket email; a B2B services firm needs target lists, outreach and a clean route from lead to meeting. The detail for each is on the SaaS, ecommerce and B2B pages.

Outsourcing done this way frees the people inside rather than replacing them. On a global technology platform's paid media, which Jakub ran as a freelance consultant before he founded the company, campaign management, creative, bids and audiences were all handled outside, which left the client's own team free to run the programme and onboard partners. Over about 11 months the cost per lead fell from $270 to $8.86.^[2]

Each of those comparisons is worked through in full elsewhere: freelancer, in-house and traditional agency. Whichever you choose, four arrangements decide whether outsourcing works, and all of them are cheaper to set up on the first day than to repair later:

AI for Marketing is one way to outsource the whole of it. We run the connected work across channels as one managed service: the work that earns attention, the pages that turn it into a lead or a sale, and the follow-up after it. A weekly report shows what changed and what it made, and you approve everything before it goes out.