Outsourcing for Retail Brands: Opportunities to Help Scale

With around 70% of businesses outsourcing some elements of their business, the key to success might not just be hard work but also clever delegation.

Outsourcing has transformed the business landscape, allowing tiny teams to take on global audiences and levelling the playing field between startups and established brands. In the retail world, it's a smart solution for creating more flexibility and expanding operations, and it's at the heart of successful scaling.

But how does outsourcing help businesses? To learn more about the potential of this strategy, take a look at some top outsourcing opportunities that can help you scale.

eCommerce Advertising

Whether you want to turn your brick-and-mortar retail shop into an eCommerce brand or scale your online store using Google's pay-per-click (PPC), eCommerce advertising is essential. It can help drive target customers to your website, increase your brand awareness, and boost conversions for a quick uptick in profit.

Google shopping is often the channel of choice for many eCommerce brands as it's typically the most profitable paid search channel, accounting for over half of UK retailers' ad clicks. If you're looking to scale your retail brand online, consider investing in Google Shopping campaigns by optimising your product feed and providing accurate and detailed product information. 

Online advertising can be notoriously tricky to get right. As you scale your business, it's smart to have a dedicated team working on your marketing to ensure you see a healthy return on investment (ROI) on all paid advertising initiatives. This is where outsourcing comes in.

A team of advertising experts can help you find the right channels to reach your target audience and create strong, engaging ad campaigns. They'll also use the wealth of data available in online eCommerce to evolve stronger and more streamlined strategies over time. 

Content Marketing

Content marketing encompasses a whole range of marketing techniques, including:

• Blogging

• Photography

• Social media content creation

• Infographics

• Video production

There are different types of content professionals available for outsourcing, such as writers, photographers, and video producers, each bringing unique skills to your content strategy.

It’s a great strategy to drive traffic to your business and generate a strong online presence. But, content marketing takes time and can be complex, making it an ideal area to bring professionals on board to help.

Luckily, the content marketing outsourcing industry is flourishing, with agencies and freelancers ready to strategise, write, photograph, and film content for your retail business. Agency-based outsourcing can be an expensive option, but agencies often bring broad experience from working with multiple clients and industries. They also have core competencies in content strategy and production, ensuring high-quality results.

Outsourcing teams can create comprehensive content strategies so that you don’t have to, use industry expertise to align your content to your business goals. They can help determine the best approach for your business, including which job to outsource and which to keep in-house. As content marketing is an ongoing, long-term strategy, it also ensures your marketing remains consistent.

It’s important to create content for apps, landing pages, and other website pages to maximize your reach and engagement across digital channels.

Boost your brand awareness, increase sales, and position yourself as an industry leader with outsourced content marketing. Effective content marketing can also improve your visibility in search engines.

Appointments and Scheduling

Running a retail brand is busy work. If you’re bogged down in appointments, meetings, and schedules, it might be time to outsource your organising.

One method of improving organisational efficiency is to implement a centralised appointment booking system. There are many software solutions available to help streamline appointment scheduling, ensuring all departments and external contractors are aligned and operate smoothly. These tools integrate with your calendar to display real time availability, allowing users to see up-to-date openings and book appointments instantly, which streamlines scheduling for everyone involved.

Appointment and scheduling software can help manage client appointments, coordinate internal meetings, and keep track of project deadlines. By automating and organising these tasks, features like automated reminders and intake forms can help save time and reduce no-shows. Your team can focus more on strategic business activities and less on administrative tasks, leaving you more time to run the business you love and enhance productivity and collaboration across the business.

If you don’t need an assistant but could use some scheduling help, check out online appointment booking software. A tool like TIMIFY makes it simple for retail brands to take bookings from potential customers, assign appointments to your team, and coordinate meetings across your sales team and manage different types of events. Users can easily book appointments through a booking page, select available time slots, and fill out forms or intake forms during the booking process. The availability for appointments can be determined automatically by the system based on your calendar. Reminders and follow-up notifications are sent to clients to ensure attendance and streamline the process, helping to further reduce no-shows and improve efficiency.

Web Design and Development

Source: timify

Over 80% of the UK population makes purchases online from retail businesses. That’s 4 out of every 5 customers, and highlights how incredibly important your website is as you scale up your operations.

But, website design and development can be complex. You need a number of skills to create a good website, including:

• An eye for visual design

• Knowledge of what makes a good user experience

• Knowledge of how your target audience likes to browse

• Key insights into how to boost website conversions

• Coding experience (unless using a drag-and-drop builder)

For a lot of businesses, this makes outsourcing to a talented web developer the clear choice. Outsourcing gives you access to specialized resources and ongoing support for your website, ensuring you have the expertise needed without allocating internal resources. With the technical knowledge to create high-performance websites, an understanding of designing for target audiences, and the ability to create striking and intuitive interfaces, it’s a wise investment for eCommerce growth.

If you don’t already have a website that enables online purchases, now’s the time to invest in one. If you do have a site, look for any potential upgrades that might help your scaling goals.

Inventory Management and Fulfillment

Owners of small retail businesses might be doing their own stock counts and shipping, with smaller batches of orders making this a cost-saving endeavour. However, the process of managing inventory can become increasingly complex as your business grows, especially when dealing with limited space for storage and operations. As you look to scale your brand, though, it’s smart to outsource your inventory management and fulfilment.

This creates the capacity to take on more orders from customers without increasing your time constraints. Outsourcing your warehousing allows you to expand your retail offerings, too, and stock more of the products your customers love—this is especially beneficial for large companies with greater space and fulfilment needs. A dedicated fulfilment team ensures your orders get out on time, enabling next-day delivery and improving customer satisfaction. Clients benefit from optimized stock levels and efficient delivery, which supports business growth.

Outsourcing fulfilment also gives you a lot more time to work on other growth strategies for your business. It’s a win-win!

How Does Outsourcing Help Businesses' Accounts?

Ensuring your business finances are accurate is crucial to the success of your business, as accurate financial management is vital to your business’s overall success. Not only does this make it easier to meet tax compliance rules, but it also:

• helps you manage your cash flow

• prevents invoices from being missed

• makes it easier to identify tax-deductible expenses

• ensures you’re ready for any future tax audits

Outsourcing your finances to a team of capable accountants takes the stress off your shoulders. With a reliable team on your side, you don’t have to worry about submitting year-end accounts or balancing your books, and your accountants might even spot some money-saving solutions to boost your gross profit

As you scale your retail business and take on staff, your accountants can manage your payroll, too. This ensures your team is always paid on time and your payroll is tax compliant, boosting staff satisfaction.

Areas of your business you shouldn't outsource

As we’ve discussed throughout this guide, there are many benefits of outsourcing for retail brands. However, there are a few areas of your business that we’d recommend keeping in-house to maintain control and ensure brand alignment as you scale. Maintaining an in house team for these core functions allows for greater oversight, direct communication, and the ability to foster company culture and expertise.

Here are a few areas where outsourcing might not be the best choice:

• customer service - keeping customer service in-house ensures you’re able to stay aligned with important company values and provide a personalised, knowledgeable experience to your customer base.

• brand strategy and core marketing decisions - keeping brand strategy in-house gives you more control over consistent brand voice and messaging across all channels, keeping efforts aligned with current (and future) business goals.

• employee training and development - keeping this part of your retail business in-house offers the ability to easily update and adapt training to changing business requirements, utilise internal knowledge and experience from leadership teams and allows you to tailor training programmes to highlight company values and long-term goals.

Keeping control of these core business areas will ensure as your business scales it remains aligned with your brand values and maintains a strong connection with your customers and employees. For some businesses, a hybrid approach that combines an in house team with outsourced solutions can offer the flexibility to balance control with cost-efficiency.

Final Thoughts

Why is outsourcing good for business? There are a whole host of reasons, including saving you time, enabling a higher volume of orders, and improving the quality of your online marketing. 

As a retail business looking to scale, the expert knowledge of an outsourced team isn't a benefit you'll want to be without.

Hopefully, this article has given you some ideas for the best outsourcing opportunities for your retail brand. For more information on the services available, speak to freelancers and agencies directly and give your scaling retail business a boost.