I know that marketing can be time-consuming. So why not just outsource or delegate your marketing and not worry about it at all?

If you’re a lawyer, consultant, accountant, or other service provider, you aren’t selling a product. Your business depends on relationships. People are coming to you for guidance and advice. But before anyone takes advice from you, they have to feel comfortable with who you are and how you can help them.

As they say in marketing circles, people have to know, like, and trust you. Effective, authentic marketing does a lot of the legwork for you by giving potential clients an idea about what kind of person you are before they ever come to your office. They get to know your voice, your approach, your philosophy, and your story.

In contrast, trying to outsource the task of building relationships is bound to backfire.

The greatest value in marketing comes from developing relationships. Building relationships involves making introductions, spreading the word about what others do, lending a helping hand, demonstrating your expertise and how you can help, and engaging in conversations, both online and off. Will someone else be able to make those introductions on your behalf? Do they know everyone you know? Will they be able to make those connections?

Even if you could outsource those conversations, do you want to assign someone else to listen and participate in conversations that could create new opportunities for your firm?

If you can’t be bothered to build the relationships, why should people refer business to you? Why should they expect you to be more attentive once you’ve already gotten the business?

If someone else is building the relationships for you, attending the events, interacting on social media, making the introductions, and having the conversations, the potential client or referral source’s relationship is going to be with that person, not with you.

Outsourcing too much of your marketing to AI won’t work either. As AI becomes more a part of our everyday lives and our businesses, people are becoming more suspicious of what they see and hear. If a potential client suspects that your marketing messages aren’t genuine, or that they are speaking to a bot rather than a human, they’re likely to disappear, and there will be no chance for you to rebuild that relationship.

What marketing tasks can you delegate or outsource ?

So far, we’ve been talking about how trying to outsource networking and building relationships, whether online or off, doesn’t work, and can even backfire.

So what parts of your marketing can you outsource?

Almost anything that doesn’t involve building relationships or demonstrating your personal knowledge or expertise can be outsourced.

For example, you can certainly outsource the design and development of your website, blog, or social media pages. Let someone else do the design and technical work so you can focus on your expertise.

Some other things you can outsource include:

• Research—if you carefully define the parameters and double-check the results and sources
• Finding or generating images and graphics to accompany your content
• Editing and refining the work you have produced
• Organizing and setting up events
• Developing and designing ads
• Generating data analytics or reports

I’d love to know what parts of your marketing you’ve outsourced successfully. Let me know in the comments!

An Outsourcing Example

Here’s one example of how you can delegate or outsource productively.

As you can see, I’m wearing green for Saint Patrick’s Day in the video since it was recorded in March, and that made me think about holiday themes in your marketing.

Developing content around holidays is an easy way to fill gaps in your content pipeline, and much of that holiday content can be delegated.

You can delegate the task of generating a list of holidays throughout the year that you might want to talk about in your marketing. These can be religious holidays, national holidays, international holidays, or just fun or silly cultural holidays.

For example, in March, we have International Women’s Day on March 8th, and Saint Patrick’s Day on March 17th. But we also have Pi Day on March 14th. If you’re a Star Wars fan, you might celebrate May the 4^th later in the spring.

Once you have your list of holidays that you’d like to talk about in your marketing or post about, you can then delegate the task of creating images or social media posts, just generally celebrating that particular holiday.

If you want to take it one step further, you can then relate that holiday to your business, your area of practice, your clients, and your audience. For example, for International Women’s Day, lawyers might decide they want to celebrate prominent women lawyers. And you can even delegate the task of generating a list of women lawyers to choose from.

Since you already know the date of each holiday, you can have those posts created and scheduled in advance.

Let me know what you think about this idea and what creative ideas you have for delegating marketing tasks effectively.

And check out the links below for more marketing resources.

Check out my Legal Marketing YouTube playlist, or look at these other articles and videos:

• Can I Outsource My Marketing?
• Balancing Content Creation and Engagement
• Improving Your LinkedIn News Feed
• Improving Your Visibility on LinkedIn
• How Good Is Your Client Selection Process?
• What Are Difficult Clients Costing You?
• Are You Falling Into the Comparison Trap?
• Making Time for Marketing
• Do You Have a Marketing Budget?
• No Time for a LinkedIn Company Page?