These service sound scarier than than the title suggests. I'm sure many consultants, agencies and companies are using services such as Upwork and 99Designs already. But I thought these were worth grouping and sharing for those not in the know or so that others can be shared.
The crowdsourcing approach where you put your tender out to anyone who wants to bid tends to be much more cost effective. In this blog post I want to open your eyes to some of the potential with outsourcing, my experience of it and highlight some of the services you could utilise. The outsource / crowdsourcing industry is seeing huge growth as more business are willing to change their processes. Elance reported a doubling of the number of jobs posted in 2011 and now boast over 1.3 million "experts" in its ads!
When we work under pressure and in the same company for any length of time it is easy to think, "this is how it works" and it is even more difficult to sit back and seriously question what are doing and how you are doing it. Outsourcing requires a different mindset, you have to want to challenge the norm, be striving for better work, open to different ideas and be looking for efficiencies (whether in process or budgets). My advice would be to use the information below to help create brief to test outsourcing some of your marketing.
Are you using agencies that are not proving valuable, do you have staff stretched over too many areas doing non-strategic tasks, are you lacking skills that would enable you to grow? If you answered yes to any of these questions, I'd say you should think about testing the outsourcing of work, it will help you scale and try new things.
There are a wide range of online services to help you find and manage your outsourced jobs. The four sites listed below are some of the more popular services used by people online. They basically include an organised directory of freelancers. You would publish your brief / requirements, people can then apply for that job. At this point you can organise / sort through the applications in each sites interface. It is easy to filter by hours worked, rating etc.
Upwork is a very well established crowdsourcing platform. I have used this a number of times at First 10 to help scale in-particular with some SEO and PPC skills, where agencies haven't cost-effective enough and the jobs are relatively straight forward.
The system looks quite dated once you login and some of the processes are a little clunky, however it does have a very large database of freelancers and I have yet to have a bad experience. I utilised this platform much more for project orientated work, rather than ongoing retainers though both are possible through the platform.
Elance is similar to Upwork, it is well established, and has a large database or workers. The key difference however is that Elance has a larger focus on programming, while it does have some marketing, finance and writing freelancers it is biased towards programming. Elance seems to attract businesses willing to pay a little more for time / projects but the overall consensus is that there isn't much between Upwork and Elance.
Freelancer is a much more online marketing / tatic orientated platform, with over 3 million members it makes Elance look small. With projects ranging from simple link-building tasks through to website build and translation, it is very likely you will find a skilled freelancer for your project. The system, usability and design is much better than the previous two systems mentioned (in my humble opinion).
99designs is an example of a niche outsourcing site, focussing purely on creative freelancers and therefore design / creative briefs. There other niche sites for virtual assistants for example, getfriday.com would be an example of this. I only have one experience of using 99designs and unfortunately it didn't produce what I was after. However it did influence the final design in a round about way. I think for business on a tight budget early in existence 99designs.com is perfect for you. Established businesses are unlikely to get the kind of design / creativity they desire. I would imagine a lot of this also comes down to briefing though. The SmartInsights logo started out here to get a range of design options and we then used our own designer to tweak it.
Taking on staff incurs a lot of costs for business, from wages, NI, desks, computers etc as well as a commitment from the management team for one to ones, personal development etc. This can make testing / trialing new ideas complex and expensive, utilising an online outsourcing service irradiates these concerns. You can always hire at a later date should you decide it would be better.
Utilising online outsourcing services gives a team that are not tied to commercial pressures of running a business, but are instead focussed on delivering as best they can against your brief. This often means you get ideas that would never normally have come into the business, consider them a bonus prize!
Internal teams can often create a level of laziness, a quick verbal brief to a handful of people will "keep them busy" and it is kind of the right thing. When you have to brief people through online outsourcing platforms you need to have considered the project / tasks from various angles as it is likely this freelancer has never worked in your industry before.
It is also a marketing cost which instantly means it comes with the requirement for an ROI. So considering you objectives, budgets, customer, idea and project is paramount if you are to get value from outsourcing work. This process and requirement means your projects are more likely to be successful and you may even find once the thinking is done that not all projects are worth progressing.
Utilising online outsourcing tools allows you to scale the number of people working on your project much easier and without anywhere as much risk as using local freelancers or hiring. This means your business can flex as the requirements to deliver do, all without adding additional risk (head count) or spending too much money.
Using online outsourcing tools does increase the pressure on the management team to create briefs and run processes, though this is offset by having less staff to manage. It may mean some projects take a little longer to deliver as the brief has to be watertight first.
There are a lot of negative things that come to mind when people consider online outsourcing, such as "how can I trust them", "what if they don't do a good job". My opinion is that you get out what you put in, if you have a good brief and take your time to select your team you will get what you asked for, if you are lazy and treat it as if people were in the same room (a typical member of staff) then it will fail. You will need to work hard to prove the concept to staff internally, but by doing this though you will create new opportunities to help grow your business.
When you first approach a website such as the four mentioned above, it is paramount in the early stages that your brief is well considered and you are crystal clear on what the deliverables are. I have outline some tips below from my experiences of using such services:
Happy outsourcing... What are your recommendations?
By Chris Soames
Chris Soames is a Smart Insights blogger and consultant, he has worked in digital marketing for over 6 years with the last few years managing international web strategies for a leading travel brand. Now the Commercial Director at First 10, an Integrated marketing agency, he helps clients get clarity on their marketing strategy and create campaigns engineered to engage with their consumers to help drive sell-through. Most of all, Chris enjoys working with talented people who want to create great (& commercial) things not just tick boxes.
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