6 Ways Creative Outsourcing Can Drive Sales and Boost Profits for Your Agency

Looking for new angles on how to increase your agency’s sales and profits? You’re not alone. With competition rising and market uncertainty putting everyone on edge, there’s consistent pressure on agency owners to make the right decisions, at the perfect time.

From changes in how people work to the prevalence of full-service digital marketing agencies, there’s a lot of changes to keep up with across the industry in recent years. 

You may be facing challenges like running out of time to focus on growing your business, working too many hours, or dealing with clients who are frustrated by long wait times. 

As an agency owner who has frequently outsourced work and is a trusted outsource partner for dozens of agencies, I’ve seen firsthand how partnering with professionals can reduce workloads, speed up project delivery, and improve the quality of work.

So if a period of growth has left you with more work than you can handle, outsourcing creative tasks to experts could be the solution you need.

Choosing the right outsourcing option for your needs

Clients today expect high standards across all the services you offer, not just the ones you specialize in. 

For creative tasks like web design, graphic design, content creation, and branding, you generally have three main options: hiring freelancers, outsourcing to a specialized agency, or bringing on internal hires.

Freelancers

Freelancers can be flexible and cost-effective for short-term projects or when you need specific expertise. But keep in mind managing multiple freelancers can be time-consuming, and the quality and consistency of work can vary.

Internal hires

Hiring internally gives you direct control of your team and the work they produce. This can be a great option for agencies looking to build long term capabilities. But it comes with significant overhead costs, salaries, benefits and time for training and management.

Outsourcing to a white label agency

Outsourcing to an agency gives you access to a dedicated team of professionals who can deliver high-quality work without adding to your in-house workload. 

This allows you to scale your services quickly and ensure all projects meet a consistent standard. Plus, you get more expertise with an agency than with individual freelancers.

What to look for in a strategic partnership:

To help you find the right creative partners for your agency, ensure they:

• Align with your core values
• Can offer support to end clients as needed
• Have the capacity to take on your predicted workload
• Can match their services to the quality of yours
• Have a proven track record of consistently delivering projects on time and within budget
• Communicate and collaborate effectively with your team
• Offer scalability and flexibility to adapt to your agency’s growth and shifting needs

The 6 main benefits of outsourcing your workload

Here’s just 6 of the many ways creative outsourcing can benefit your agency:

1. Provides an opportunity to explore new revenue streams

As a digital agency, expanding your services can feel like a risky move. Especially if you’re used to working with tight budgets or even with a tight-knit group of people, investment in resources and infrastructure to support additional services can feel like a big step.

This is why outsourcing creative services to strategic partners can be hugely beneficial. If you think the demand is there for a new service, you can test this theory by hiring a professional partner to help. In doing this, you can see how receptive your clients are to new services, without detracting from your current way of working.

Offloading the burden of a new service onto a partner is a great strategic move, but it will only benefit your business in the long run if you select the right partner. 

2. Allows you to adjust your offerings to suit individual needs

How often have you had to tell a client that you don’t offer a particular service? Even if this doesn’t cause you to lose the client, it can still impact how they perceive your agency.

For instance, many agencies hire web design partners who don’t provide SEO optimization. As a result, they deliver a website that ultimately underperforms for their client. Offering these additional services through the right outsourcing partner can make a huge difference in client retention and satisfaction.

If an important client has a need for a service you don’t offer, it’s now possible to avoid them going elsewhere to find it.

With the right strategic partner you can:

• Increase client retention rates
• Target specific client pain points
• Add value to your existing services (and raise prices accordingly!) 
• Diversify or redefine your offerings to draw in new audiences
• Boost your positioning (without needing to invest in additional resources in-house)
• Add ‘premium packages’ to upsell clients

3. Helps keep your sales pipeline moving

We all know that outsourcing tasks can increase the efficiency of most business operations. However, what’s sometimes overlooked is just how much outsourcing creative tasks to specialty agencies can help keep your sales pipeline flowing.

For example, with a team that’s ‘ready to go’ as soon as you seal the deal on a certain service, you can jump straight back into selling. If the creative agency or freelancer you partner with offers project management as part of their service, you can get them to handle all client interactions and focus on other areas of your business.

Without the ‘back and forth’ of web development to worry about, or issues with one project taking up the resources of an entire team, think of how much additional time you’d have to invest in areas like:

• Sales
• Marketing
• Client relationships/Customer service
• Process optimization (incl. automation)
• Talent retention
• Growth strategies

So many agency owners get bogged down by specific services they offer — without realizing that if they offloaded the responsibility of these tasks, they could instantly optimize their intake of profit. 

How strategic partners can help improve sales:

• No need for service development — The services creative partners offer will already be outlined for you, with the exact parameters of what clients should expect
• Sell and keep selling — With creative partners ready to go as soon as work comes in, your agency can make the sale and then jump straight back into finding your agency’s next lead
• A tried and tested process — Specialty agencies know what they’re doing, so expect more direct referrals for a job well done
• It’s easy to pitch something you have full confidence in — The more you outsource, the more confident you’ll become in pitching these services (especially if you regularly work with the same agencies, you’ll know their process as well as your own!)
• Demanding clients will consume less of your time — With creative partners giving you the freedom to pick and choose which projects you want your team to be involved in, the areas you’re not so confident in (or the clients you don’t gel with) can be left to the experts!

How to ensure you’re not overpromising on the services you don’t offer in-house

Selling the services of another agency can take time to get comfortable with, but a good creative partner will be happy to help you speed up the process. To ensure you’re on the same page about the exact services you can offer, a reputable white label agency or creative partner should:

• Offer discovery or onboarding sessions to get you up to speed
• Have clear guidelines for how their process works
• Outline the exact deliverables you’ll receive
• Provide information about how involved they’re willing to be with your end client

4. Gives you more time to focus on client relationships and build brand loyalty

We all know that brand loyalty is hugely important for service providers, but how can creative outsourcing boost brand loyalty for your agency?

With recurring income a particularly important focus for digital agency owners hoping to ‘future-proof’ their business, the time and energy it takes to nurture client relationships and consistently enhance your value can feel like a full-time job.

This is why for agencies hoping to free up time and focus their existing resources on developing client relationships, it’s important to know when strategic partners might be useful.

By handing over the reins on tasks that usually take up a lot of staff resources, you can focus on:

• Finding new ways to market your services e.g., creating new custom or ‘premium’ packages
• Putting more time into customer service and ensuring the speed of your response times keep clients happy
• Identifying new strategic areas of your business to invest in, with the aim of establishing recurring revenue and making your business invaluable to clients
• Presenting your agency as an industry leader by connecting with others in your field and actively involving yourself in the ‘big conversations’ taking place

Tip: To keep track of exactly what your clients care about, invest some of your recently acquired free time into tracking industry trends. From global consumer trends to economic trends, having creative partners means you can focus your attention on what’s to come!

5. Helps stabilize the future of your digital agency

Following on from the previous point, finding the time to focus on the future of your agency can be difficult when the present consumes so much of your time. 

While most digital agencies will be aware of new technologies and advancements in their field, few have the capacity to adopt new ways of working as soon as they’re released. 

This is often due to a lack of:

• Expertise in the area
• Agency agility (e.g., not being able to allocate resources to investigating new technologies as they emerge)
• Budgetary limitations
• Available staff
• Investment opportunities

However, with the right support, your agency can jump straight into adopting new technologies and keeping up with how the industry is moving. It’s just a case of evaluating which areas will be most strategic for you.

Here are some examples of specialities for web designers and digital agencies to have strategic partnerships in:

Graphic design/branding 

From logo design to full brand strategies, many companies are investing in unique branding to stand out. But achieving a high-level of branding excellence requires expertise and know-how which can be challenging for agencies without in-house design teams. 

Partnering with a specialist graphic design and branding agency can help meet your client’s needs for innovative and strategic branding so their brand looks great, resonates with their audience, and makes a lasting impact in the market.

Copywriting 

​​Good communication is key to any successful marketing strategy, and copywriting is at the heart of it. Whether writing website content, ad copy, or social media posts, high-quality writing can make all the difference in how a brand is perceived.

However, writing great copy takes a special mix of creativity and strategy, which your employees may not have in their skill set. By partnering with a copywriting agency, you can ensure your clients’ messaging is clear, effective, and on brand so they can connect with their audience more and get better results.

Web development

With more and more businesses turning their attention to online operations, a good website is more important than ever. However, as many of our clients know — delivering a great website to an end client can consume more time and energy than any of the other services they offer.

Why?

When it comes to web design and development, the final design (if carried out professionally) will be the result of:

• Extensive research
• Defining project goals
• Budgeting
• Meetings 
• Developing the design
• Continuous testing (performance, functionality, accessibility)
• Evaluating relevant integrations
• Content creation/SEO optimization
• Preparation for launch

As well as this, there are other responsibilities associated with web design and development that are often overlooked. 

This can include:

• Website administration (e.g., hosting, troubleshooting, managing integrations)
• Project and client management
• Providing access to or reporting metrics
• Website maintenance and updates

By outsourcing all or even just some parts of your agency’s web design responsibilities, you can ensure end clients experience the full effects and benefits of having a website that helps them stay relevant in a global society.

Recurring revenue services

Recurring revenue services offer a sustainable path to growth. They generate consistent income and build long-term client relationships by providing continuous value. Examples of these services include: 

• Content marketing: Regular blog posts, articles, and other media keep your clients top of mind and support their overall marketing goals.
• Email marketing: One of the most effective ways to nurture leads and drive conversions, email marketing keeps clients connected with their audience through well-crafted, targeted campaigns.
• Social media marketing: Managing and growing a brand’s presence on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn allows clients to build communities, increase visibility and talk directly to their customers.

By partnering with specialized agencies in these areas, you can offer your clients comprehensive, high-quality services without developing these capabilities in-house.

6. Allows you to focus on the development of your in-house team

Did you know that engagement and retention rates are 30–50% higher in companies with strong learning cultures? Not only is this a sign that digital agencies (and companies in general!) need to take professional development more seriously, it’s also a sign that the focus on outsourcing creative services doesn’t always need to relate to clients.

With more advanced expertise within your team and a happier workforce all round, you can improve the quality of the work you deliver and boost revenue with value your clients won’t find at other agencies.

However, with online learning now more possible than ever, it might be easy to assume that creating courses and professional development plans for your team might be easy. The unfortunate truth is that while yes, technology has evolved to allow us to offer education from the comfort of an employee’s home — managing learning content and outcomes can require specialized skills.

This is, again, where strategic partners can come in. There are now entire agencies dedicated to helping you create custom learning programs that are not only engaging for your staff, they can also be hugely beneficial to your agency’s offerings as a whole.

With excellent customer support from learning management platforms, it’s now possible to get direct support from industry experts on more than just the ‘obvious’ creative services.

Increasing sales and profit might just mean changing tact

As digital agency owners, it’s natural to want to ‘do it all’. But as we’ve learned from experience, this approach usually isn’t always realistic. The saying “a jack of all trades but a master of none” is one we consistently come back to when discussing outsourcing with our clients. To move your business forward, sometimes it really is best to start by taking a step back.

Especially when it comes to maximizing your profits and maintaining control over your business outcomes — keeping everything in-house might seem like a logical strategy, but as this blog outlines, letting others take over strategic areas of your operations can actually put you back in the driver’s seat of your own agency.