There are a lot of tasks all small businesses should outsource. Consider outsourcing those areas where you and your team struggle or that you are doing by yourself (but shouldn’t).
Research shows that when you multitask, or manage multiple projects at once, you can experience a 40 percent drop in productivity.
“Juggling is an illusion,” writes Gary Keller, chairman of Keller Williams Realty. “In reality, the balls are being independently caught and thrown in rapid succession. It is actually task-switching.”
On average, multitasking costs the global economy more than $400 billion annually.
Also, look at the difference in costs between a full-time hire and outsourcing. That difference alone could help you decide.
Here are five tasks you can easily outsource to contribute to the growth of your business, while freeing up your time.
- Digital marketing
There’s a variety of areas that a marketing assistant can cover for you.
Social media management, e-blasts, content creation, graphics and digital strategy among others.
The objective is to generate inbound leads and drive traffic to your web or social network.
Content creation is the use of easy-to-digest content that is designed to educate your target audience without being too “salesy.”, but content also nurtures the relationships you have with those leads to improve your chances of closing a sale.
Over 40 percent of companies have an executive in their organizations who is directly responsible for content marketing. Unfortunately, small businesses like yours may not have the budget for that.
Rather than spending your time producing and distributing content, or hiring a marketing team to handle it, I recommend outsourcing it.
You can start small by hiring just one marketing assistant, or you can employ an entire marketing team (outsourced of course). Both options will save you money, and help you build better relationships with your customers while generating new leads.
- Customer service.
Not everyone has people skills.
For any company, the customer service provided is its most important weapon to keep clients happy and attract new ones.
It takes a lot of diplomacy and knowledge to deal with problematic customers, or to communicate the correct information without rambling and without taking a lot of time.
When you outsource a customer service representative, or representatives, you can create your own customer service.
From a cool modern without scripts service to very corporate, delicate and scripted support.
Customer service representatives will answer phone calls, and emails for you, providing elite service and resolving doubts or giving support, so you can relax and focus on more important things.
Here are the best customer service companies of 2016
- Lead Generation.
Most businesses generate leads through online marketing, and the content you produce works to convert them into leads. According to Search Engine Land, the average conversion rate across most industries is just over 2 percent, with the top 25 percent of sites seeing conversions at 5 percent or higher.
There’s a lot you can do to improve your conversion rate, but it’s a time-consuming process.
Instead of trying to manage, test and track the continuous cycle of changes, you should work with an agency that specializes in conversion optimization.
While marketing strategies produce “inbound” Leads, an agency can give you “outbound leads” which is more effective due to the infinite information that you can research online about your target market.
You can have close to 100 new leads a week, to contact and build a very specific database, and one advantage is that you can always improve the data and research to fit your needs.
- Appointment Setting.
I highly recommend outsourcing your appointment setting.
I am sure that you have a database just standing there, getting full of dust, that no one updates, but you really want to take time to call those clients and offer them your services.
And follow up on old clients, and maybe call new ones.
But guess what? You don’t have time.
That is why you should hand your database to an agency (see point 3) so you can generate an updated database and also contact those potential clients to set appointments.
With outsourced appointment setting, you can generate 10 new clients, on average, per month.
- Scheduling and administrative tasks.
It’s easy to get bogged down in dozens of small tasks that eat up your time each day. As a small business owner, you need to focus on your core processes to grow your business. When you hire a virtual assistant, you can eliminate a lot of wasted time spent on emails, agenda management and other repetitive tasks. When you automate employee scheduling tasks using software, you can focus less on busy work and more on the big picture.
What are you waiting for?
