Are you planning to outsource digital marketing to India or a country in South East Asia? Read why you should consider outsourcing digital marketing to India and save yourself.

You are a profitable business owner in the U.S., UK, or Australia. You are experienced with outsourcing services to a different country and have tasted success owing to cost arbitrate in terms of technology and development between your country and a more cost-effective country such as India. You believe that outsourcing your digital marketing (like your technology) would help you scale your business as you would be able to lower your marketing costs because of lower labor costs.

If you are thinking this way, you are only partially right. Digital marketing is huge and there are only some aspects of it that one should consider before outsourcing to India. Let’s explain why we think that outsourcing all digital marketing to India is not such a great idea.

1)      The Digital Marketing Industry in India is Immature: Indian IT and software development has an extremely mature model. Even the smaller, unknown companies know and understand this model well. (Though the cost of the arbitrage model only would not succeed for long.) The Indian Digital Marketing model is extremely immature and broken.

2)      Mediocrity of Digital Marketing Resources: IT has a large supply of talent in India. Digital marketing is still in its growing stages and is usually not the first choice for recent graduates. When interviewing candidates, we see that they want to join digital marketing because it is a low hanging fruit. Hence, you will find a lot of mediocre level resources and very few high-level resources. Even in terms of training, there are still no official schools providing this (some B-schools have introduced these courses). There are some sham institutes providing poor knowledge to prospective students.

3)      Poor Understanding of the Digital Marketing Ecosystem. SEO, SMM, SEM, and many others. Each of these are their own verticals in themselves. If you are outsourcing these services to a freelancer or an individual, it is extremely likely that the so-called digital marketer you are dealing with does not have a complete understanding and expertise of all the verticals.

4)      Marketing is Made Up of the Word Market – If the person you hire for digital marketing does not know your market and represents your company online, do you think the correct message will be conveyed?

5)      Never, Ever Outsource Social Media to Another Country – This is an absolute no! We understand. Being a digital agency ourselves, saying No to business (and money) may not be in our best interest, but ultimately if your client succeeds, you succeed, and the other way around. Social media must be extremely local in nature. The local events, holidays, tone of voice, and humor, all should be taken into consideration.

What if you cannot afford a local digital marketing agency and after reading these points you are not sure what to do?

The solution is an agency with a hybrid setup to give you the benefit of both and optimize the results for you. A hybrid agency in this context refers to a company or agency that has a presence in your local market and manages some resources directly in a more cost-effective location, such as India. “Local” personnel will address the gaps of market understanding, tone, and humor; an outsourced team passes the advantages of cost-effectiveness to you!

For certain tasks like SEO execution, SEM, and PPC maintenance, outsourcing works well. Your SMM should be maintained locally and your account manager should ideally be a local one.

We vouch for such a model. We have created a dynamic, hybrid model over the years and have created the processes around it to make everything transparent as well as measurable. We have multiple clients working via the same process and understand the difficulties and needs of our clients and our setup aims to solve the gaps mentioned in this article.

If you would like to talk about how Dignitas Digital can help you with your digital marketing needs, send an email to hello@dignitas.digital or call 267-693-4069.