When running a small business, the amount of work that falls to you and your small team can be overwhelming. How are you supposed to boost efficiency in your business when there’s so much to do and not a whole lot of help?
There are actually quite a few services, which you can allocate specific task-related work from your business. I know what you’re thinking, “If I could afford that, I’d hire another employee”. First off, it doesn’t cost very much at all to outsource small, monthly tasks or to allocate on a per-project basis. It’s definitely nowhere near the cost of the salary of a full-time, or even part-time, employee.
Outsourcing services will not only boost efficiency but also, support your business’s growth and success. Continue reading for the five most common services to outsource for your business, that will boost efficiency and won’t break the bank.
5 Services To Outsource
For Your Business That
Will Boost Efficiency
Social Media Marketing
Outsourcing your social media marketing is hands-down, one of the most popular aspects of a business that people outsource. There are actually a lot of moving parts that go into promoting your company’s content onto each platform, with their specific rules and functions in the marketing space.
Social media marketing also entails quite a bit and it’s totally normal to outsource everything from posting, engagement, polling/campaigns, data analytics, and designing platform-specific images for each post.
Most businesses are marketing on social media because not only is it (for the most part) free but it really is the best place to gain exposure to new clients. There are plenty of outsourcing companies that will provide you with even further support than previously mentioned.
These additional functions range from content creation, keyword and SEO research, and researching your target demographic for more cleverly-aimed advertising efforts.
IT Managed Services
When something goes wrong with your IT, everything in your business shuts down! With a standard service contract, you have to wait for something to break before computer support can come out and fix it.
This makes no sense at all considering it could result in hours or days of downtime. But what if you could keep your IT from breaking in the first place?
In addition to that, how does “peace of mind” that your computer systems are being monitored 24/7. Or less downtime because all of your systems have been identified and issues fixed before they even start to cause you problems.
Predictable budgeting and an all-inclusive, all-you-can-use IT service that includes hardware and software sounds great to me! So do fewer disruptions since having your own IT service will provide most services remotely or overnight.
Bookkeeping
When it comes to finances, it’s important to have an expert at the helm. Hiring a bookkeeper ensures that the P&L sheets are balanced and the rest of the money is budgeted and allocated correctly. It also means you technically wouldn’t have to allocate any of the bookkeeping to some virtual assistant.
You’d hire a firm that specializes in accounting and bookkeeping for small businesses. Once you’re a client, they will assign a bookkeeper to your account. So all of your finances will still be outsourced but you’ll be getting the best in the business to do the bookkeeping by hiring an accountancy firm.
Don’t you want to make sure that your business is paying the correct amount of taxes (and you!)? A bookkeeper can also help save you money where possible and plan a monthly budget meeting with you and whoever does the payroll at your company. These meetings are handy to find and cut down on unnecessary spending as well.
SEO
SEO is a major focus for businesses who are trying to develop their online presence. And with so much competition, this can make standing out a lot more difficult.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and “is the process of increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a search engine, such as Google or Bing.
The term refers to the improvement of unpaid results (known as “natural” or “organic” results) and excludes the purchase of paid placement” – Wikipedia. The higher you rank, the more traffic (ie, organic results) you’re going to see approaching your website.
Again, a lot of companies exist solely now to work on improving a website’s SEO and this can range from a short-term goal to an on-going collaboration as a business grows.
Market Research
Everything involved with running a business takes up a lot of time in a single day. There isn’t time to constantly watch your target market, identify new trends, and see how your competition is responding.
Outsourcing your business’s market research is a brilliant idea because the job itself isn’t very time consuming inside a workday. It’s also not a job that you would need someone to work more than maybe two days a week?
It would be a real money-saver to just have someone put together a few reports twice a week. And since that’s all you really need from this position, allocating it is a perfect idea.
These are just a few examples of the most allocated jobs that companies will usually outsource to an outside firm. So why not try outsourcing some of your own tasks? You’ll watch your business transform into a more well-oiled and efficient machine!
Jessica Rose Adams
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