When we say outsourced marketing, what do you picture? Someone creating a few social media posts, running your LinkedIn page or perhaps looking after Google Ads?
All of those things can form part of outsourced marketing, but they are not what we mean by it at Silver Apples Digital.
For us, outsourced marketing means becoming part of the commercial engine of a business.
It means understanding who you want to sell to, why those customers should care and how you reach them. It also means looking at what happens when someone becomes interested, how marketing connects with sales and where CRM, automation and AI can make that process work better.
Ultimately, marketing should help the business grow.
What does outsourced marketing actually mean?
Outsourced marketing is when a business brings in external expertise to manage some or all of its marketing function, rather than trying to build every skill internally.
For some companies, that might mean outsourcing one particular area such as SEO, paid advertising or content. For others, it means having an external team effectively operating as their marketing department.
That can include strategy, positioning, messaging, websites, content, lead generation, CRM, automation and measurement.
Done properly, outsourced marketing is much closer to having an external marketing department than simply having somebody “doing the socials”.
Should marketing actually help generate sales?
Yes.
There is obviously an important qualification here. Marketing cannot guarantee that every lead becomes a sale, because there are other factors involved such as pricing, product-market fit, the sales process, competitors, budgets and timing.
But marketing should absolutely be designed around commercial outcomes.
Its job is to reach the right people, get their attention and help them understand why your product or service matters. It should build trust, create opportunities, support sales conversations and nurture people who may not be ready to buy today.
That is very different from measuring success by how many posts went out this month.
Social media is a tactic. It isn’t the strategy.
Social media can be incredibly valuable. We use it ourselves and we recommend it to many of our clients.
But posting on LinkedIn three times a week isn’t a marketing strategy. Neither is running Google Ads, redesigning your website or starting an email newsletter.
They are all tactics.
The strategy comes first. What does the business need to achieve? Who are we trying to reach? What do those people care about and why should they choose us?
Only then should we start deciding which channels and tactics make sense.
The problem with “just doing marketing”
We regularly meet businesses where marketing has developed organically. Someone updates LinkedIn, another person looks after the website, an agency runs Google Ads and sales has its own spreadsheet.
Customer enquiries might arrive in three different inboxes and somebody sends a newsletter every now and again. There can be a huge amount of activity happening.
But nobody is necessarily looking at the whole picture.
That creates an important distinction.
Marketing activity is not the same as having a marketing system.
You can be extremely busy without creating consistent commercial results.
What happens after somebody becomes interested?
Imagine someone visits your website today, reads about your service and fills in a form.
What happens next? Who receives it? How quickly does somebody respond, and does that enquiry go into your CRM?
If they aren’t ready to buy today, what happens then? Does someone remember to contact them again in three months, or do they disappear into an inbox?
This is where the lines between marketing, sales and systems start to disappear.
And I think that’s exactly how it should be.
The customer doesn’t care which department owns each stage. They simply experience one journey with your company.
Marketing and sales should be working towards the same customer
This sounds obvious, but it doesn’t always happen in practice.
Marketing might celebrate generating 100 leads while sales says none of them are any good. Or marketing may think a campaign has performed brilliantly while sales barely knows it exists.
That is why we put so much emphasis on getting sales and marketing working together.
Both sides should understand who the Ideal Customer Profile is, what makes a lead valuable and what problems customers are actually trying to solve. They should also understand what creates urgency and what happens to a lead after marketing generates it.
Marketing shouldn’t simply throw leads over a wall and hope sales catches them.
Some of the best marketing insight is sitting inside your sales team
If you want to know what content to create, ask your sales team what customers keep asking them.
What do prospects misunderstand? Why do opportunities stall? What objections keep appearing and why do customers eventually choose you?
Those conversations contain incredibly valuable marketing information.
If ten prospects ask the same question on a sales call, there is probably a good article, video or piece of website content hiding in that question.
If customers consistently misunderstand your proposition, your marketing may need to explain it better before the sales conversation even happens.
Marketing and sales should make each other better.
When should a business consider outsourced marketing?
There are several points in the growth of a business where outsourcing can make a lot of sense.
One is when the business has grown beyond founder-led marketing. Many companies begin with the founder networking, selling, posting, following up enquiries and doing almost everything themselves.
That works for a while.
Eventually, it becomes very difficult to scale.
Another common situation is when a business has built a sales team but hasn’t built the marketing support around it. Those salespeople need good messaging, content, campaigns, case studies, lead generation, CRM support and sales materials.
Marketing should make the sales team’s job easier.
What if you already have a junior marketer?
This is another situation we see quite often.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with having an intern or junior member of staff creating social media content. Junior marketers can be incredibly creative and very good at execution.
The problem comes when they are expected to decide the entire commercial marketing strategy themselves.
That isn’t really fair on them.
They need direction around who the company is targeting, what the business is trying to achieve, which messages matter and what success should actually look like.
An outsourced marketing team can provide that strategic layer while the internal team helps execute it.
Outsourced marketing versus hiring one person
There is also a very practical reason businesses choose to outsource.
One marketing hire is still one person. Even a very experienced marketer is unlikely to be equally strong in strategy, copywriting, design, SEO, paid advertising, CRM, automation, AI, websites, analytics, video and sales enablement.
An outsourced team can give a growing business access to a broader range of skills without immediately having to build a full internal marketing department.
That doesn’t mean outsourced is always better.
As businesses grow, internal marketing teams often become essential. In many cases, the best model is a combination of internal knowledge and external expertise.
What should you expect from an outsourced marketing company?
If you are considering outsourcing your marketing, I would ask much more than how many social media posts you’ll receive every month.
Ask how they will understand your customers. Ask how they will work with your sales team, how they decide which activities you actually need and how leads will be captured and followed up.
And ask what they intend to measure.
You should be able to understand how the marketing activity connects, at least in part, to the commercial goals of the business.
What does outsourced marketing look like at Silver Apples Digital?
At Silver Apples Digital, we tend to start with clarity.
Who are we selling to? What value do we provide? What are we trying to achieve, and what is currently preventing growth?
Then we look at what the business actually needs.
That might involve marketing strategy, ICP development, positioning, messaging, websites, content, LinkedIn, SEO, paid campaigns, email, lead generation, CRM, automation or AI.
Often it will be a combination of several of those things.
We don’t believe every business needs every marketing tactic, and we don’t believe more activity automatically means better marketing.
The question we keep coming back to is:
What does this business need marketing to achieve?
Marketing should lead somewhere
That is probably the simplest way I can explain how we think about marketing at Silver Apples Digital.
Good marketing gives you clarity around who you are targeting and why they should care. It creates a story that helps people understand your value, and it creates momentum by moving the right people towards a conversation.
Not everybody will buy immediately, and not every individual marketing activity can be neatly tied to one sale.
But there should be a commercial logic behind the work.
Because marketing shouldn’t exist simply to make a business look busy.
Marketing should help the business grow.
That is what we mean by outsourced marketing.
It isn’t just outsourcing your social posts, your website or your advertising. It is bringing in the strategy, expertise, people and systems needed to make marketing a more effective part of your commercial growth.
At Silver Apples Digital, we work as an outsourced marketing team for ambitious businesses, particularly those selling complex, technical or innovative products and services.
We bring together marketing, sales and smart systems so that the work has a clear commercial purpose.
Because the goal isn’t more marketing. It’s marketing that leads somewhere.
