The Economics of Hiring an Outsourced Marketing Department – It’s a Bargain!

The Economics of Hiring an Outsourced Marketing Department - PSM Marketing

For over 25 years PSM Marketing has delivered marketing department services to clients across the country. Whether you are in the legal, solar energy or recruiting industries, there is no doubt that hiring a company like PSM to serve as your outsourced marketing department will save you money, produce revenue growth, and eliminate the need to manage an in-house marketing team.

There are many clients we work with who didn’t know outsourced marketing was an option for them, as well as a healthy number of clients who have had bad experiences with freelancers or agencies. Why? There just aren’t very many outsourced marketing firms in the country that focus specifically on professional services firms. Marketing the time, talent, and expertise of your lawyers, solar engineers or recruiters requires a unique understanding of how to “sell the invisible.”  Generally, your “product” is your people and the expertise they deliver – not a product or widget. Selling the intangible benefits of working with qualified professionals requires significant experience working with professional services firms.

What Happens in Many Services Firms?

Generally marketing is not at the top of the priority list for busy professionals. Rather, they would prefer to serve clients and do their work. However, today’s competitive demands require professional services firms to proactively build their individual and firm name recognition. This requires a sophisticated, strategic approach to marketing. Even so we have often heard statements like:

  • “We have a really great administrative assistant who knew how to do desktop publishing, so we now work with him to do all of our marketing.”
  • “Over the years we have hired different people to help us with our website, social media, graphic design, copywriting, communications, SEO…… but we lack consistency in our branding.”
  • “We have one person in marketing who just graduated from college and they need a lot of guidance and direction we can’t give them.”
  • “We paid a lot of money to a website company and now all we have is a nice website with no real marketing around it.”

The Cost Justification of Outsourced Marketing

Let’s talk dollars and cents. The average salary for a law firm marketing director in Minneapolis in 2022 is $161,000. But what does a marketing director need? Well for starters, a team of other professionals including copywriters, graphic designers, social media specialists, website developers, and SEO professionals – to name a few. Add to that the marketing director’s benefit package (usually an additional 33%) and the office space required for a marketing department. Don’t forget all those Macs and other marketing technologies required to staff an in-house marketing department and you quickly bounce up into the $500,000 per year range.

Outsourcing your marketing to a firm like PSM Marketing will allow you access to an entire marketing team dedicated to YOU for far less than the salary of one marketing director. With PSM Marketing’s fixed fee model, full outsourced clients generally pay anywhere from $8,000 to $10,000 per month – maximum of $120,000 per year.

Our Experience: Your Outsourced Marketing Department

You might wonder what’s included in that fee of $120,000 per year. Your marketing team will be comprised of:

Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) or Director of Marketing – to oversee everything and to develop the strategic assessment and marketing plan for your firm. Part of this process is designing the marketing implementation timeline for the next 12 months.

Project Manager – At PSM Marketing, your project manager is the mortar between the bricks of your outsourced marketing engagement. That person works closely with your outsourced CMO to manage the delivery of all services including:

  • Advertising – digital or print
  • Analytics – on everything we do from SEO analytics to communication campaign results
  • Client Satisfaction – creating electronic surveys to keep your finger on the pulse of your client’s satisfaction
  • Communications – including e-communications and updates to write, design and distribute
  • Copywriting – including blog posts, articles, ads, web page content
  • Database Development – Client Relationship Management (CRM) or communications (MailChimp)
  • Graphic Design – including branding and logos, collateral materials, trade show booths and more
  • Proposals – we assist our clients on developing winning proposals for new business
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – increasing search engine ranking and driving qualified leads
  • Social Media – content curation, blurb writing, posting and engagement
  • Survey Development – for embedded interactive surveys on your website
  • Training – on all areas related to marketing
  • Videography – including video shoots, video transcripts, creation of YouTube page development
  • Website – planning, development, maintenance, and updates

Outsourced Marketing…It Just Makes Sense

The long and short of it is – hiring a marketing director and a marketing team can be cost-prohibitive for many companies. Plus, it’s unlikely that even one very experienced hire would have all the skills you need to deliver full marketing department services to your firm and its professionals. Outsourcing your marketing department to PSM Marketing will provide a cost-effective way to access all the marketing services you could need, while paying a fraction of the cost to staff an in-house marketing department. We would welcome the opportunity to discuss how outsourcing your marketing department can provide real-time access to every marketing resource you need to grow your business yet cost far less than the salary of one marketing person.

PSM Marketing