Businesses of all sizes are looking to hire remote marketing teams. Here’s how to make it work for your business.
Marketing is crucial to the future of your business, but it can also be costly and uncertain. Hiring a full-scale internal marketing team can be prohibitively expensive for most small businesses, putting them at a disadvantage against larger competitors. In an increasingly busy marketplace making yourself heard as a small business can be tough.
One option could be to outsource the operation and hire a remote marketing team. Rather than taking on the expense of an internal team, this can help you scale operations up and down as needed and benefit from top-class talent and cutting-edge technological infrastructure.
How remote marketing works
Outsourcing is becoming increasingly common as businesses look to hire third parties to manage operations such as customer service, technical reports, or accounting. With remote marketing, you can contact a specialist company with its own team of professional marketers to promote your business, products, and services.
You will pay a set fee for which you’ll benefit from the expertise of their team and all the infrastructure available.
Alternatively, you can hire a remote marketing team on a freelance or contractual basis, building up a team of contractors to work with you on ad-hoc projects. This can be useful for companies who may need staff for a short space of time to work on specific projects such as a product launch.
Why hire a remote marketing team
Hiring a remote marketing team comes with a host of advantages:
• More bang for your buck: Hiring your internal team can be expensive. You need to hire staff, office space, and equipment. You may also be restricted in terms of talent by the location of your office. Hiring a remote team enables you to do away with the space, equipment, and staff and simply pay a fee to a company.
• Specialist talent: Hiring a remote marketing team allows you to cast the talent net wider. A remote marketing team will have all the latest equipment and a highly trained team of specialist marketers ready and waiting to work on your product. You can pick and choose who you work with from a much wider selection of talented professionals.
• Flexibility: With an in-house marketing team, you’ll be paying the same amount every week regardless of need. Sometimes resources will be too much; sometimes they won’t be enough. Hiring a remote marketing team enables you to scale up or down as needed. When you have a specific project in mind you can bring in more marketers to boost your team.
Fresh perspective: When you hire a remote marketing team, you’re ringing in highly qualified external experts. They will come to your product or service with a fresh pair of eyes and new ideas that could be invaluable in driving new sales revenue. Sometimes this different perspective can open up new opportunities you weren’t aware of before.
Hire remote marketing teams, the cons
There are of course some reasons why an in-house team might be beneficial in some situations. They will know your company and product better giving them better insights into how it works and the customers to target. A remote marketing team will take time to get up to speed with your product and may struggle to replicate the innate understanding you have of your product.
When you have an in-house marketing team, you’re in control. You have regular contact with your team who will be in the same office complex and can easily shape the strategy and manage them in person. You can be more agile and flexible in how you work. When your team is in the same office as you, the only thing you need to do to change strategy is speak to them.
How to hire remote marketing teams
There are, therefore, challenges, but these can be overcome if you adopt the right strategy. When hiring a remote marketing team think about the challenge in three dimensions. If you focus only on one – such as cost – you’ll lose out on others such as quality and effectiveness.
Here are a few things to think about:
• Recruitment: Whether hiring a remote marketing team as a whole or building up your remote team person by person, think about the skills and qualities you need in your business. Outsourced marketing companies will generally employ highly skilled individuals capable of turning their skills into many different marketing challenges. However, it pays to do a bit of due diligence and find out who they have working for them or what recruitment support they can provide in adding new staff to work on your project.
• Training: All remote marketing teams need training to understand your product, company, and market. This can be a two-way process. Their expertise can bring new perspectives that could identify new opportunities you might not have already spotted.
• Payment: Understand the best payment structure and see how it compares with using an in-house marketing team. Set clear benchmarks and key performance indicators so you can assess your new remote strategy effectively and evaluate how well it’s working.
Hire a remote marketing team overseas.
The number of companies looking to hire remote marketing teams in other countries is growing. Better technology and communications are making it possible to work with professionals around the world and take advantage of lower labor costs.
Countries such as South Africa, with a young, highly qualified, workforce represent an excellent option. A low cost of living means wages are around 40% to 60% of the level in the UK depending on the job role. While other low-cost destinations provide language barriers and a lack of available skills, South Africa has both. English is widely spoken and cultural similarities make it easier for marketing professionals to engage and empathize with customers. A commitment to following best practices in everything they do also provides security, reliability, and accountability.
South Africa is only a couple of hours ahead of the UK and Europe which means it’s a good time zone match for the UK working day. Meetings can be scheduled easily and services can be delivered without undue delay.
Another reason for hiring remote marketers could come with overseas expansion. Launching a product in a different country can be challenging. You’ll be unfamiliar with the market conditions, the existing competitors, or the customer bases.
Hiring a remote marketing team in that country gives you a team of professionals on the ground with in-depth local knowledge and expertise in that sector. They can help you adapt your product or services to the nuances of the market, supercharging your prospects of success.
When hiring a remote marketing team overseas, you will have to set up an effective legal structure. The traditional approach has been to set up a legal entity and employ people directly, but this comes with expense and risk. Your marketing team will also need administrative staff to support and manage their employment and make sure all legal requirements are taken care of.
Ticking each box in a foreign and unfamiliar country can be challenging and foreign companies have a high risk of unintentional noncompliance. Keeping pace with a constantly evolving regulatory landscape can be challenging.
A cheaper and more effective way is to hire an intermediary in that country such as an Employer of Record (EOR) or a Professional Employer Organization (PEO). Each of these differs slightly in structure, but they serve the same purpose – to take on the administrative burden of managing staff and provide expert localized legal knowledge to avoid falling afoul of the regulators.
An EOR serves as the legal employer of staff in that country. They may already have people available who can provide marketing services or they can provide support in hiring, recruiting, onboarding, and managing the employment of a new team.
The EOR will be responsible for managing all the details of employment including onboarding, worker classification, managing PAYE, making deductions, and managing day-to-day employment matters.
A PEO, meanwhile, will work as a shared employer alongside your own company. They will effectively work as the HR department managing all the legal and administrative support while you will manage the day-to-day employment.
Both of these offer a low-cost and low-risk way of hiring remote marketing teams in another country. They can be a great way to access highly skilled talent without having to take on the cost and upheaval of setting up your subsidiary.
They can offer a short-term or long-term option. For example, if you’re just expanding into a new country, you can dip your toe in the water by using a remote marketing team through an EOR. If the expansion goes well, you could then look at establishing a more permanent entity in the country.
Hiring freelance marketing teams overseas
Countries such as South Africa also offer a good source of highly qualified freelance professionals. They can offer comparable skills to marketing professionals in your own country at a much-reduced cost.
They can also help in the early days of expansion by providing one-off support on specific projects. You can work with them on a case-by-case basis scaling up support as and when needed.
As the working relationship evolves it may be worth building a more long-term relationship by hiring them as contractors. They will work with you regularly but will still be independent and will perhaps also work with other companies.
Hiring people on a contractual basis can be part of a pathway that leads to a long-term full-time employment relationship. This can be a great way to build a team of professionals with an in-depth understanding of your business operations.
As the working relationship evolves you may find yourself with a diverse team comprising a mixture of full-time, contractor, and freelance staff. Making sure each worker is classified correctly according to the law can become challenging. Using Agents of Record (AOR) can remove the administrative burden of doing this and also avoid any unintentional compliance issues.
Building success for the future
Whatever the size of your business or the nature of your marketing strategies, therefore, the ability to hire a remote marketing team can drive enormous benefits. It can help you access new staff, scale operations as needed, or optimize your costs.
If you’d like more support on how to hire a remote marketing team download our free guide for all the information you need.
