Digital marketing is a very recent and quickly evolving space. As more and more business is transacted over the internet, the importance of managing your digital strategy is growing exponentially, both in terms of the direct marketing of your products/services and also the quality of those products/ services.
Many businesses are coming to realise that it can be difficult to completely outsource the responsibility of effective performance of this function and instead, are moving all or at least a substantial part of their digital marketing activities in house. With the skill sets required to effectively implement a digital marketing strategy, this can be a difficult outcome to achieve cost effectively – this is where the use of offshore Filipino staff can be a great advantage.
The Philippines has an excellent reputation for staff with high-quality creative skills
In recent years, this has led to an explosion in the amount of digital marketing work that is being performed for Western countries by offshore Filipino staff. From graphic designers to social media monitors, copywriters, web developers and digital marketing managers, it is possible to build a complete offshore digital marketing team in the Philippines.
When it comes to setting up an offshore digital marketing team, you will need to take your time and be careful with your recruitment. A number of the staff you will be looking to recruit will be in high demand and in order to attract their interest, you will need to make sure that both your salary package is attractive and that the offshoring provider you are partnering with has a reputation as an employer of choice. Filipinos are extensive users of social media and will quickly find out the reputation of your offshoring provider in the marketplace. The best indicator of a providers’ performance is their annual staff turnover – this is a question well worth asking through the provider selection process.
In addition, it may be worth consider recruiting graduates and training them to meet your needs. Some providers have partnership arrangements with well-regarded universities that will help give you access to quality graduates. Whilst there may be a greater initial investment of time and effort, the medium term payoff of proceeding this way can be both a high level of staff loyalty and also a much better value proposition – graduate salaries can be up to one tenth that of candidates with 5+ years’ experience.
Regardless of which way you chose to proceed with your offshore team, the cost savings are worth it. If you do an apples and oranges comparison of the total costs of employing someone in Australia (including all on costs such as rent, electricity etc) against the cost of engaging the same person in the Philippines, the savings are likely to be in the order of 70% or more.
