This post originally appeared on startupnation.com/grow-your-business
Outsourcing will always be an entrepreneur’s best friend. However, many fail to understand the underlying benefits of outsourcing, like what to outsource, and how to maximize their efforts. Outsourcing is a tactical solution to reduce your company’s overhead expenses, while successfully scaling and delegating certain tasks to subject-matter experts.
As an entrepreneur, your day-to-day operations likely focus on strategy, fundraising and networking, more so than content creation, social media management, or payroll.
When you’re launching your business, you need to embrace the benefits of outsourcing and use them to your advantage to propel your business to new heights.
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What are the benefits of outsourcing?
- Access to top talent: While startups typically constrain themselves to only hire employees in their specific regions, outsourcing allows you to tap into a whole new pool of talent.
- Improved efficiency: Instead of focusing on every single detail of your business, your employees can now focus on the organization’s core competencies. A dialed-in focus will allow your organization to optimize its business process, which will reduce overhead expenses and labor costs.
- Retain control: As most entrepreneurs will attest to, growing your business is a complicated and delicate process. Outsourcing specific tasks allows you to retain control of your business and grow within reason.
- Reduce overhead expense: Since you are outsourcing specific tasks, you no longer need to allocate internal resources or hire additional employees for them.
- Experience growth: Ultimately, outsourcing will help your business grow.
To help you begin, consider outsourcing these five tasks to free up your time so that you can focus on crucial aspects of your business: growth, company culture and leadership.
- Social media
Entrepreneurs utilize social media to reach new customers while showcasing their products or services. But creating posts and building a loyal following takes time. Fortunately, outsourcing your social media efforts is one of the cheapest and easiest tasks to delegate to a reputable virtual assistant or firm.
The individual you hire for the job should be able to schedule and create posts, but more importantly, he or she should make sure they dedicate time to responding to comments and interacting with your followers. Since social media does not require technical knowledge, it is one of the cheapest tasks for you to outsource and the easiest to find quality talent.
Even as you begin to outsource your social media efforts, make sure you only focus on two to three platforms. Narrowing your focus will allow your paid contractor to focus, optimize and dial in on strategy.
- Content marketing
Creating content remains a challenge for many entrepreneurs. Creating content that engages your readers, showcases your product, and ranks in Google is even harder. Fortunately, when partnering with a reputable content marketing agency, these firms will create content that evokes emotion and creates a buzz around your product or service.
As most tech startups will attest to, creating an internal content team is difficult, because it requires significant capital investment, resources and valuable time. However, working with a content marketing agency will save you both time and money.
Related: 8 Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know About Outsourcing
- Website development
If your website is not one of your startup’s core competencies, then there is no need to spend hours on end teaching yourself how to code in order to develop a subpar website. There are plenty of freelance web developers who you can hire to do so.
Remember, your website serves as a first impression. Don’t you want your website to stand out to your audience? Of course you do! So, it’s better to outsource this task to someone who is qualified. An experienced developer will optimize your website for SEO, speed, and above all, will ensure it is easy to navigate.
- Customer support
While it is essential to understand your customer’s needs, it can sometimes take hours to sort through feedback and respond to each issue. As you can imagine, hiring a full-time customer support specialist is expensive; but outsourcing your customer support efforts will save you time and will still allow you to receive candid feedback.
Make sure the person you hire regularly provides you with a one-page synopsis of the issues your customers have encountered. This feedback will allow you to understand their needs and will provide you with actionable information that you can then give to your product team.
- Public relations
All profitable businesses harness the power of renowned publications and media outlets to reach a new audience, establish authority, and to expand their brand further.
However, getting featured in large news outlets can be confusing and requires specific expertise. Instead of wasting time on figuring out how the complex media landscape operates, outsource these efforts to a reputable public relations firm or specialist.
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Wrapping up
To keep you focused during the earliest stages of entrepreneurship and to sustain your growth, you need to leverage outsourcing to your advantage. Outsourcing allows you to focus on core business competencies, team management, and will help you achieve growth at a breakneck speed.
The post 5 Tasks Entrepreneurs Should Outsource to Focus on Growth appeared first on StartupNation.
