For 57-59% of businesses, cutting costs and focusing on core business activities are two of the main reasons for outsourcing. 47% of organisations also use it to solve capacity issues, followed by 31% who believe it enhances service quality.
More recent data shows that seven in ten British businesses outsource to third parties – leaving a mere 25% who prefer to handle their operations in-house.
IT is the most frequently outsourced function, though 34% of businesses also hand over their digital marketing responsibilities. This is more common for organisations with over 50 employees (66%), such as us at Adzooma, who have found it useful to outsource Design and Development work.
So, can outsourcing help businesses reach success quicker? Here are 5 companies who have grown, elevated and thrived using digital agencies.
5 success stories made possible from outsourcing
These 5 examples will give you insight into outsourcing key areas of digital marketing, providing useful takeaways that you can apply to your own business.
Let’s get started.
1. Alibaba
Employees: 10,000+
Key outsource area: Development
At the end of Q1 in 2017, the Chinese multinational Alibaba reached a grand total of $5,405 million in revenue, making an increase of 60% year on year. From core eCommerce alone, their revenue equalled $4,587 – a 47% year-over-over increase.
The company has seen success from their outsourced projects since 1999.
They began outsourcing their development to a US firm in order to reach and appeal to a bilingual audience, including both English and Chinese. Paired with internet restrictions in China, outsourcing allowed the brand to build a sustainable infrastructure without any drawbacks.
They were also able to secure funding for future growth and benefit from skills and knowledge that wasn’t as prevalent in China at the time. Alibaba’s Founder even talks about this in one of China’s best-selling books, “alibaba: The Inside Story Behind Jack Ma and the Creation of the World’s Biggest Online Marketplace”.
It’s now the second-largest IPO of all time, after Google, and has been deemed as one of the world’s most innovative companies.
2. Procter & Gamble
Employees: 10,000+
Key outsource area: Digital marketing
As part of a multinational agreement, Accenture took care of P&G’s Global Business Services (GBS) regarding its end-to-end global service delivery. The aim was to improve its solution delivery quality and capacity, grow its use of virtual reality capabilities and technologies, improve efficiencies and reduce costs.
Accenture had the global scale P&G needed to succeed.
It was a leader in the managed services business and had a proven track record of business process outsourcing. And, through the Accenture Technology Labs, it had positioned itself as an early pioneer in virtual reality and large-scale visualisation solutions.
During the collaboration, Accenture managed P&G’s digital marketing campaigns, e-retailer content and virtual reality centres, as well as the Internet sites, applications and home page features across more than 30 markets for P&G’s popular “Thank You, Mom” campaign during the Summer Olympics.
Even more, both P&G and Accenture won the ‘Most Innovative’ Outsourcing Excellence Award for commercial services collaboration, celebrating the excellent solutions that were delivered during this time.
3. Cisco
Employees: 10,000+
Key outsource area: Network management
In 2004, Cisco acquired a services organisation known as Cisco ROS. It provides global clients with remote management services, including network security and core routing, and performs operational work such as responding to outages.
Rich West, Senior Engineer for Network Operations, Cisco, said this “frees our IT personnel to focus on strategic activities such as optimizing the network to make it more resilient.”
Duncan Mennie, EMEA network operations lead for Cisco, helped to develop the processes for outsourcing. While they retained core activities and outsourced contextual, day-to-day tasks, the team were able to focus on their core competency, which was “developing and supporting new technologies for Cisco.”
Outsourcing network management and monitoring also led the firm to their current fortunate position – waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
4. SeatGeek
Employees: 200-500
Key outsource area: Brand growth
Hoping to disrupt the event ticketing industry, SeatGeek Founders Russ D’Souza and Jack Groetzinger looked to Kayak for inspiration.
The idea was to build a platform where users could search for the best-valued tickets available from more than 50 event-ticketing sites. When a transaction is made, SeatGeek gets 10% from the transaction. Sounds simple right?
Like most of these companies, it became apparent that outsourcing tasks to talent in other countries was the only viable option for success. They needed to partner with a company that was already engaging a huge fan base – which Yahoo did to perfection.
They also relied on outsourced developers to build their website and database structure, and continue to work regularly with contractors through oDesk to gather photographs and collect ticket price data.
Just in 2015 alone, SeatGeek had doubled its annual revenue to $25 million.
5. Slack
Employees: 1,000-5,000
Key outsource area: Design
Slack hired the Canada-based design firm MetaLab to rework their logo, website and app back in 2013. They wanted to turn their early prototype into a visually-appealing, polished product, and it was completed within 6 weeks from it’s start date.
Slack had the vision, and MetaLab brought it together with a brand new look, feel, and sound – giving users a similar experience to a video game.
In the words of MetaLab:
“We strived to fill the product with delightful, and unexpected, interactions—the logo animates in a burst of colour as it loads, the modals slide down from the top of the screen, gifs appear at random like Russian roulette.
Throughout the entire app, everything seems to playfully jump around and pop off the screen. Each of these moments is designed not only to help the user understand what’s going on, but put a little smile on their face.”
Now, Slack has more than 12 million daily active users, each enjoying the playful design and unique features created by their agency of choice.
Work smarter, not harder
As you can see, some of the biggest and most successful brands have used digital agencies for outsourcing.
The amount of work your business outsources and manages in-house will depend on your needs, resources, priorities and budget, but it’s almost definitely needed if you want to scale.
Designed to speed up that process, the Adzooma Marketplace can put you in front of hundreds of agencies that specialise in these areas. Find one that can give you hours of your time back today.
