Whether you’re a small business owner or entrepreneur – every minute of your day counts – Time is money. Small starts ups often don’t have a budget for a full time marketing manager either. Think about outsourcing these 14 tasks:

Website Design: Every business needs a website these days. There are brilliant free options out there now, but learning every trick in the book is very time consuming. Bringing in a web designer to handle set up and marketing services for maintenance can free up time. Google also loves fresh content for its website rankings.

Blogging: While I believe you should be in control of your social media avenues, engaging a  freelance writer to broaden your ideas/thoughts and broadcast them is better than never getting the words out at all. Choose somebody with experience within your industry.  

Media Contacts & Press Releases: A marketing specialist can research and compile a list of specific media contacts, write a press release and email out releases along with follow up phones calls.

Social Networking: Providing regular, valuable content to your followers is key to making the most out of your social network sites.   A marketing service can keep all your profiles up to date and respond to comments on your blog for maximum traction.

Assessing Advertising: Can’t get around to placing that ad or now what suits your niche? Marketing services can compare price, calculate reach and return on investment in a nice little report.

Marketing Research: All business projects should entail some degree of market research to maximise its success – though firms will often skip over it and wander why things don’t work out how they planned. Marketing services can interview members of your target market and source industry research you otherwise don’t have access too. New product innovations or often born in this space.

SEO: Outsourcing your search engine optimisation to a SEO specialist is a must and can ensure that your website ranks well for your niche. The cost is often less then you think.

Database Management: If you rely on a database of existing and past customers — or you’ve built a database of individuals you think could become future clients — you may want to have it updated. A Marketing service can update all the contact information and get the name of the correct personal.

Event Organisation: When it comes to planning an event, it’s worth bringing in a professional event organiser. Invitations, registrations and meal planning are just a couple of the related tasks and all are incredible time suckers. There is nothing glamorous about it. Even if you only do one event a year, an event organiser can handle all of the details.

Newsletter Management: Newsletters are a great way to stay front if mind and in touch with your existing clients, but companies struggle to find the time to create them. All parts of a newsletter can be outsourced. You may even consider outsourcing your internal newsletter.

Article Writing: Distributing articles about your company’s niche, linking to your site, and citing you as an expert, can help market your company online. You can engage a writer to create just a few such articles or a large batch, just as you might hire a freelance writer for another project.

Marketing Audit: Many marketing firms offer services that assess your marketing efforts. They are designed to highlight gaps in your current marketing and deliver a roadmap. You may be spending unnecessary time and money on things that are just never going to make an impact.

Customer Feedback: Conducting surveys or interviewing with your clients and compiling results are best outsourced, otherwise you are in danger of setting up and proving your own hypothesis and missing what you really need to hear.  Consider doing this after every major implementation or project or all at least once on a larger scale.  

Marketing Materials: Business cards, brochure ware, and other marketing materials are a necessity for most businesses, but contacting a graphic designer is only the start. A marketing specialist can also assess its purpose, relevance of images, copy and distribution to maximise the impact and save it from being placed in the bin.