Written by Steven Brough on March 11th, 2010

Outsourcing Services: Sales and Marketing

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Fundamental to the success of almost any business is a robust sales and marketing strategy. Central to a good marketing strategy is the ability to deliver a message to a target market in an eye-catching, cost-effective way and the precise strategy should be the subject of well thought out project planning. Business managers have many different marketing methods at their disposal in order to achieve the purpose and one effective way of obtaining an edge over your competitors is to enlist the help of web outsourcers. Between them, these people have a broad range of expertise and create a competitive market which drives costs down and quality of delivery up.

The internet is an extremely powerful marketing tool which means that there is plenty of work which can be outsourced remotely. Most sales brochures, advertising brands, logos and web design can be designed in this way. Similarly, work is available researching potential commercial customers, obtaining contact information from the internet and sending targeted marketing e-mails.

One of the new growth areas is Search Engine Optimization or SEO. This technique is concerned with driving high quantities of relevant traffic towards a particular website. In order to do this, the website must contain substantial web copy dense with relevant keywords (the existence of these keywords will cause search engines to prioritize a particular web address in its search list). If your website is at the top of a search engine list it will get more hits and more potential customers. An additional stage is link building, the process of linking a website with other commercial businesses. If a sale is affected from a customer who visited the site from your link, you will be entitled to a commission. This method is typically used by small business entrepreneurs who are not able to offer the items for sale themselves.

Other, more traditional, marketing services can also be outsourced with reasonable ease, there are many websites setup just for these purposes e.g. ScriptLance, Freelancer~GAF, RentACoder and Elance .

Telemarketing services have famously been outsourced by multi-national corporations with mixed results. These large scale operations involve (usually western) companies - such as large banks - setting up a call center in a poorer country. Telephone customers are directed to this center and the English speaking workers use a database of information in order to answer enquiries. Outsourcing benefits of this approach include the ability to drive down costs (which, in turn, can be transferred to better product offers for the customer) as well as creating jobs in emerging economies. However, one perceived disadvantage is the creation of a feeling of bad faith amongst some customers, who believe they should be entitled to discuss their consumer issues with similarly domiciled inhabitants.

A call center operation such as the one described in the paragraph above is clearly a major operation raising legal issues beyond the scope of this article. However, smaller operations can be created reasonably simply using platforms such as Freelancer.com which allows businesses to assemble virtual teams of telemarketers and outsource services.

The team might live in many different countries but they are able to keep in contact by telephone and internet, through which they can be briefed about business policy and guidelines. The main requirement is availability during certain periods, corresponding with the hours of business of the company in question.