How An Offshore Marketing Team Can Work for Your Business

27 Mar 2017

Web developers, application developers, search engine specialists, social media moderators, content writers, digital marketers, graphic designers.

These are just some of the roles that form a fully-functional marketing team in any business.

When you look at your current marketing team, do you have all of these skills? Do you have these capabilities?

In many cases, you don’t. This means you need to rely on expensive contractors to deliver items on a project basis. Take a website for example. Your marketing resources may be able to make small text amends or load new images up. But if you want to make wholesale coding changes or customise some development, you’ll need to engage a contractor.

How much do these contractors usually cost locally? Well, usually it is north of $100 – closer to $150 per hour for small amendments.

The same can be said for graphic design or search engine optimisation.

The Importance of Role Assignments

Most medium, large and listed companies will have a team of marketing generalists. Team members have a broad understanding of marketing principles and can perform most tasks required to a certain level.

However, to perform these varied tasks takes a bit longer given their lower levels of competence. They might be stronger with graphic design than they are with search engine optimisation or marketing automation.

If they’re given an automation task, it might take longer to set up a campaign than a digital specialist that is proficient in it. What does this mean for you and your business?

Well, that team member ends up being caught up in a task they are not highly competent in, sacrificing their ability to work on other tasks.

Sure, marketing generalists have an important role to play in any organisation. But having a team of experts all performing their duties at an incredibly high level allows for significant efficiencies to be achieved.

A Bit of Cost Breakdown

Herein lies the problem. A team comprising of any of the below roles is going be very inhibitive from a cost perspective. Assuming we are sourcing some very junior roles with one or two mid or senior level roles in the mix, it might look a little like this:

  • Digital marketing assistant ($45,000 in basic salary costs)
  • Graphic designer ($65,000 in basic salary costs)
  • Content and copy writer ($45,000 in basic salary costs)
  • Website developer ($100,000 in basic salary costs)
  • Digital marketing manager ($85,000 in basic salary costs)

Keep in mind these are just basic salary costs. It is not inclusive of superannuation or fixed costs associated with employment (technology set-up, operational support in the form of human resources and IT, office space, etc.) Added up, it comes out to more than $300,000.

Taking all of those fixed costs into account is where it gets a little scary. Junior employees with low base salaries still occupy prime office space in CBD locations that attract premium rents.

They still require human resources and IT support.

Adding those costs onto salary can push the local costs of an employee through the roof. A junior digital marketing employee on a base of $45,000 can easily exceed $100,000 in total costs.

This is where the true potential of an offshore team is demonstrated.

Why Offshoring Works

You can source highly qualified and skilled marketing team members at very competitive rates.

These team members can support your local resources to deliver exceptional marketing services to your business and give them capabilities they may have been missing due to cost pressures.

Rather than spending significant amounts of money on contract website development services, you could have a full-time website developer committed to your website.

Changes can be made almost instantly and whenever required without having to worry about engaging with contractors.

Maybe you need a tender developed, but your local resources do not have the time to deliver. Rather than pay an agency thousands to layout, you could access your own full-time graphic designer to develop all sorts of assets for you.

Your local team member is responsible for managing the employee and also ensuring the quality is of an acceptable standard, so there is still an element of employee management in the mix.

It’s a model that works well, especially with tools like Trello, Skype, Cloudwards, GoToWebinar and a headset thrown in the mix.

Why do I know it works? I have a full marketing team working for me in the Philippines.

An Offshore Marketing Team at Glance

My team comprises of a senior digital marketing manager, a full stack developer with over 15 years of experience, a content and copywriter and a business development and digital marketing assistant.

 

 

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Everyone on my team has a unique skill set vital to the marketing process.

 

 

 

 

They all have highly specialised skills in the key areas of marketing required for me to deliver and execute our traditional and digital marketing plan.

Having all of these highly refined skills allows me to focus on setting marketing strategy – my team in the Philippines then executes the strategy, with me reviewing and approving the work.

It’s incredibly efficient and allows me to focus on the bigger picture.

My team are all excellent at what they do and we all work well together. We all have our priority areas. However, we are all consistently learning and developing new skills from each other – collaboration is key!

Having this marketing team has allowed our business to implement a strategic and effective marketing approach targeting our business.

However, I know that if I didn’t have access to Filipino resources, I wouldn’t have the team I have today.

As discussed earlier, having a team of similar skills and experience in Australia would set our business back over $500,000 in salary and fixed costs.

My team over in the Philippines is far less the approximate total cost for all of the team members I have listed is around the $120,000 mark per year inclusive of salary and total costs.

That is the total cost.

I’ll let that sink in.

Cost Savings Comparisons

For the cost of one senior employee in Australia, you could have four high performing offshore workers.

These types of savings mean that if you have held off on adding marketing headcount to your business, you could potentially look at an offshore workforce.

Offshore workers can empower your local team members with capability they may need, but have been unable to attain due to cost pressures.

It also allows them to enhance their management skill sets, and work with team members in other geographic locations.

Offshore teams should be a part of your business strategy. They can assist your business in realising new levels of efficiency but also add capability and capacity that your business may need to grow.

Want to learn more? Get in touch with us today to learn more about what an offshoring plan can do for you.