3 reasons you should never outsource your marketing overseas
As a business owner, you know finding the right marketing partners is difficult. Where do you find the best partners to work with? You likely have seen other businesses outsource their marketing overseas, using platforms like Upwork, freelancer, fiverr and others.
You may have seen the end result turn out great, but didn’t see how stressful the process can be.
As a marketing broker, I speak to many different businesses and owners who want to outsource their marketing and hire freelancers or agencies overseas. They believe that their dollar will go further.
What they don’t see is the time, stress and lack of quality they receive in return.
Let me take you through a recent experience that I had using one of these platforms to outsource the development work of my new website. I put myself through what my customers would go through so that I speak from a place of experience. Given that I’ve interviewed hundreds of marketing agencies and contractors, I assumed that I would have a better chance of picking the right partners.
Let me provide context. When I’m picking partners overseas, my goal is to look for value.
If you ignore value and choose to spend more, you may have better luck. But then that defeats the purpose of outsourcing the work overseas.
Here is how my vetting process went:
- Posted the job on one of the platforms and received over 40 different responses
- Developed a sheet where I ranked development work, ability to communicate and if they had design capabilities
- Narrowed a list of 40 potential candidates to 5 people who I then interviewed
- Picked the best candidate for the project.
- Dealt with a large amount of stress till the project was completed.
Here are the four reasons why I would never recommend outsourcing your business’s marketing in order to “save” money.
1. You will inevitably feel frustrated, angry and stressed
This was my experience when working with my development partner overseas. The lack of communication, understanding of context and execution ability was poor. My assumption was that if I gave the developers the exact design files they needed, they would be able to recreate what was done in my Figma design.
I was wrong.
There were many inconsistencies and just animations that didn’t make any sense. There was very little attention to detail so I spent close to 15-20 hours of my own time making a document of all the errors and things that needed to be changed.
Items that were issues:
- Poor use of animations
- When sections looked similar, they would copy and paste but not update the text
- Develop some sections entirely differently than design due to lack of skill
- Inconsistent text sizes
- They used multiple plugins when one plugin would have sufficed – this makes the website slow and harder to manage moving forward
- Don’t account for margins on mobile devices
- Creating separate sections for desktop and mobile, when one could be used for both
The biggest issue for the project was that the developer built the website with the wrong tools. I had asked for the website to be built with Elementor which implies using Elementor Pro since I owned it for my current website. Instead, they built the website with 5-10 other plugins, because they didn’t have Elementor Pro nor asked me for my license.
This was a huge problem. After all that work, I had to get the website redone. At this point, I was prepared to just use one of my own partners to finish the project because I was confident in their skills and how much time they would save me.
2. You may not know who is actually working on your project
When you work with outsource partners, you may be talking to one person but they may have different people completing the project. This becomes an issue because you aren’t speaking directly to the person doing the work. So what was explained may be taken out of context or passed on incorrectly.
This happened to me many times throughout this project until I realized this was the case. I got through this by asking to have the entire team to be present when I was explaining tasks.
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3. Many of your instructions may get ignored
Throughout the project, I created a google document with all the changes to the website that needed to be done. Many times, I would go into the document and see that they skipped certain changes. This required multiple follow ups and even more time lost.
Most outsourced “value” agencies do not have access to paid plugins you need to build a website
As a business owner, you may not realize this and end up getting a website that uses a large variety of plugins. For my website, eight extra plugins were used to build my pages instead of just one: Elementor pro.
The issues this causes are many:
- You need to update your website more frequently
- More plugins means that there are more dependencies that can break your website
- Security becomes an issues if these plugins have vulnerabilities
So what ended up happening with my project? Even though most of the pages were completed, they were done incorrectly, which means I took my project back to one of my own partners to do it correctly. Saving me time, headache and frustration.
If you had a similar experience or want to save yourself from the negative experience that I and many other business owners have had, get in touch. I’ve vetted hundreds of agencies and partners who do great work.
As a marketing broker, my job is to make sure I have the best marketing partners for you to work with.
Reach out and let’s set up a call.
