Some businesses have a negative impression of outsourcing, and others simply have never considered it, but the truth is that outsourcing can be extremely beneficial. This is especially true for smaller businesses that can often benefit from the expertise and experience that they would otherwise not be able to afford.
Here we take a look at how you can revolutionize your business by outsourcing some of your key tasks.
Invest in SEO and digital marketing
If there's one thing that is certain about digital marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO), it's that this industry changes extremely fast. This can be a major problem for small business owners who are reliant on their website to bring in revenue—if you fall behind with your SEO or other forms of digital marketing, it can become almost impossible to catch up.
That’s why it can be so valuable, especially for SMEs, to work with a digital marketing agency. Modern digital marketing requires specialist staff in fields varying from web design and technical SEO to content writing and video production. These are not things that can be easily or cheaply employed in-house.
A digital marketing agency can handle all of this for you, improving your website, bringing in extra organic traffic, and managing your PPC advertising for more cost-effective campaigns.
Work with specialist tax accountants
For many small businesses, it seems to make sense to deal with your accounts yourself. It might be the case that this is something that you have always handled—you know what you're doing, so why bother with the complexity of getting an outside business to work on your accounts in any way? The truth is that while many small business owners may be capable of running their accounts, they almost certainly won’t be getting the most out of them.
For example, you might not realize that you could be eligible for a number of tax reliefs.
“Many businesses miss out on R&D unnecessarily,” says Simon Bulteel, Founder and Owner of R&D tax specialists Cooden Tax Consulting. “This is a woefully underutilized government scheme—companies are often simply unaware that there's money that they could be claiming."
When you work with outsourced accountants, you get the expertize of finance specialists with years of experience working with businesses like yours.
Get your phones answered
This is something that is easy for small businesses to overlook; just how much time they lose to answering phone calls and dealing with inquiries directly. Once again, this may be a legacy issue in that when your business was starting out, you could handle all of the phone inquiries between you and your staff.
But as SMEs grow it can become an increasing challenge for staff to field all calls and inquiries. Worse, it can take up a serious amount of time that would be far better spent on business-critical operations. This is why it makes so much sense to outsource your initial phone answering to a service provider.
A virtual receptionist or telephone answering service can take the initial call—if it requires only a simple response, they will be able to handle it. If it's one of the rare queries that needs a specialist to deal with, it can be passed on to you.
Improve your cybersecurity
Unfortunately, it's no longer the case that you can install a firewall and antivirus software and feel that your business is secure. Cybercriminals have become far too sophisticated and well-resourced, and it has put the onus on businesses of all sizes to make significant upgrades to their defenses.
This is another example where the kind of expertise that you need to improve your cybersecurity cannot be easily brought in-house. There's a shortage of cybersecurity professionals, making them highly expensive to employ. Outsourcing is actually an excellent option in this regard, as you can rely on professionals with extensive experience.
Pay for graphic design
Graphic design is something that too many businesses think that they can do themselves. The results are often poor, and this can actually cause a range of issues, including looking unprofessional or even putting off customers altogether.
It's definitely worth investing in high quality graphic design work by an experienced designer. This could include everything from designing your company logo to preparing graphics for email marketing campaigns.
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