Syed Balkhi — September 23, 2019 — September 23, 2019
As a small business owner, you have a lot on your plate. But, that doesn’t mean you should do everything yourself—consider outsourcing. By outsourcing some of your daily business tasks to another companies or individual, you can spend more of your time growing your business.
Outsourcing might seem like something only big businesses can do, but that’s not the case. Small businesses can take advantage of a number of affordable outsourcing services and remote freelancers to streamline processes and save time.
Here are 5 things your small business should outsource.
1. Accounting and payroll.
Accounting is time consuming and it can also be difficult if you don’t have any experience with it. And if there’s one thing you don’t want to mess up, it’s your money. Outsourcing your accounting and payroll will not only help your business manage your money better, but it will also help you avoid getting into trouble with the IRS come tax season as well.
While there are many tools on the market that claim to make accounting easy like QuickBooks and Intuit, it’s better to free up your time and ease your mind by outsourcing this important task. Then, you can focus on doing what you do best—bringing more money into the business.
2. Customer service and support.
Providing excellent customer service is one of the most important aspects of any successful business. Today, customers expect to be able to get in touch with a business 24/7. In fact, according to HubSpot, 90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as important or very important when they have a customer service question. 60% of customers define “immediate” as 10 minutes or less. But, as a small business, how can you be there to answer customer questions around-the-clock? The answer is to outsource your customer service and support.
By outsourcing customer service, your business can answer emails, phone calls, social media messages, and live chat requests at all times. Plus, you can also get multilingual support in order to reach more of your customers.
3. Digital marketing.
If you want your small business to be successful, you need to be online. According to Pew Research, 26% of US adults are almost always online which is part of the 77% of US adults who go online daily. So, you need a digital marketing strategy to promote your business to that online audience. But, there are so many parts to digital marketing such as SEO, blogging, email marketing, social media marketing, and much more. Mastering and managing all of those areas is nearly impossible.
For instance, it might seem easy to run an online contest to market your business by using a giveaway plugin for WordPress. But, there is a lot more that goes into running a successful online contest such as promoting the giveaway. If you don’t have enough time as a small business owner to promote your giveaway effectively, you won’t get the results you’re looking for.
Instead of hiring a huge marketing team, you can outsource these digital marketing tasks. For example, you can hire a social media manager to manage your social media accounts. Or, you can hire a freelance writer to create blog content for you.
4. Administrative tasks.
As a business owner, you have a lot to do in a day. But it’s important to focus on growing your business instead of getting caught up in menial administrative tasks. So, you should consider hiring a virtual assistant. A virtual assistant can make sure your business is running smoothly by completing all of the repetitive business tasks like scheduling and appointment-setting, responding to emails, performing data entry, managing calls using business phone services, and more.
Plus, by hiring a virtual assistant, you don’t have to worry about providing an extra office or equipment to them; the assistant can handle all of these tasks from their very own home. Finding a talented virtual assistant shouldn’t be that difficult either. According to statistics published by ValueWalk, in the US, there’s a 79.7% increase in the number of telecommuting employees who have identified themselves under the category of virtual workers.
5. Visual content.
While there are free design tools online like Canva you can use to create visual content for your business, not everyone is skilled at design. The last thing you want to do is spend a ton of time creating visual content, only for it to appear unprofessional. The same goes for photographs. If your competitors are hiring professional photographers to take photos of their products for example, your iPhone shots will likely pale in comparison.
So, you should be outsourcing designers and photographers for your visual content. This includes the images on your website, your company logo, brochures, and other original artwork for marketing and social media campaigns.
Over to you.
Many people think that small business owners should wear multiple “hats”; they’re supposed to be the bookkeeper, the sales manager, the customer service agent, and so on. But, if you wear too many hats, you can lose focus on what’s important—growing your business. So, consider outsourcing some tasks so you can spend your time more wisely.
Business & Finance Articles on Business 2 Community
(28)
