Updated March 1, 2025
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Outsourcing marketing services is an excellent way to increase your department’s productivity or add expertise in a particular area without adding headcount. Most likely you’ll be managing a contractor that is not physically at your office. This tip is all about managing your marketing services contractor to get the information you need without adding a cumbersome and laborious process.
Updates from Marketing Services Partner
Set a schedule of regular updates that fits your business need. If they are working on a project where you need daily updates, we suggest this easy form. We’ve used it for years, and it can take less than 5 minutes for the marketing services partner to complete. It also provides you a quick snapshot of what’s going on and any potential problems that need addressing. You can also modify it for weekly or bi-weekly updates. For monthly status reports we suggest a different framework (look for an upcoming outsourcing marketing service tip).
The purpose of this daily (or weekly) update is to briefly communicate activities. We recommend bullets to succinctly capture progress and details (not prose that takes considerable more effort to create and therefore you to read).
1. What I Did Today
This is high level synopsis of daily activities like:
- Created Feedly account for content curation
- Subscribed to the following RSS feeds:
- Completed Hootsuite University Tutorials modules 101, 105, 106.
2. Problems I Encountered
This is the place where your marketing services partner/vendor/contractor highlights any technical difficulties, missing documents, misunderstandings about process, etc… they encountered. If no issues arose, fabulous; just leave this area blank. The point is to bring out any problems or situations before they can fester.
3. How Can You Help Me
In my past-life as a manager, I always appreciated those who alerted me to an issue along with suggestions on how to solve it. This area of the update sheet should list out what resources or information is needed in order to move forward. Here are a few examples:
- Need administrative access to Hootsuite Account
- Unclear as to key industry influencers; need 10 minute WebEx meeting to review Feedly account, confirm current lists and identify ones to add.
- Google Analytics does not have social media tracking set up properly. Need authorization to correct web code to website.
We created this form into a Google docs and then shared to the appropriate individuals. This avoids unnecessary emails and creates a system to organize the updates. The comment features on Google docs allows for questions to be answered quickly.
Do you outsource marketing services? What would you add to our update report?
SEO Copywriting Tip: Mind Mapping
If you are too busy with your business to execute social media and website updates it is fine to seek out a marketing company to help you maintain these needs. Great article.
Thanks for the compliment; we aim to please. Yes, we find that many of our clients are simply too busy to maintain their website or keep up with social media marketing. An important element for outsourcing is finding a strategic partner who understands the competitive landscape and can articulate point of difference in whatever marketing medium is used.
I agree with the first commenter. Marketing includes way too many processes and start-ups/small businesses cannot just focus on all that. They should focus more on the core ones, like sales, development, and so on. It won’t hurt to acquire support from other companies.
A marketer’s to-do list is never ending. Enlisting the help of service providers can increase productivity as well as go a long way to maintain sanity. Thanks for weighing in!