All savvy business owners have the same question: what to outsource to improve productivity?

This is an important question to ask yourself as the growth of your business can outpace the growth of your team. Outsourcing work can free up more time for you to focus on growing your business and taking care of business operations.

In this article, we’ll explain why it’s important to outsource work and cover the different tasks you should outsource to improve productivity.

What is outsourcing?

Outsourcing is a tactic used by businesses of all sizes to hire a flexible workforce to take on some of their projects. This lets business owners focus on other aspects of running their business.

Outsourcing is different from off-shoring.

Offshoring is essentially hiring a cheap workforce to do as much work as possible or going for the quantity over quality work ethic. It lowers business costs by shifting business processes abroad, usually in developing economies where labor is cheap.

On the other hand, outsourcing is used to get important projects or tasks done quickly and it involves finding the right team to do the job.

Benefits of outsourcing work

It’s crucial to find the right people for the right job and according to your brand’s guidelines. Depending on what you need, an expert can help you improve productivity and can get the job done sooner than your in-house team members.

For instance, if you need to create a blog post and produce a podcast episode, hiring a single person to do everything is not possible. Instead, you can hire a copywriter to create engaging blog posts and get help from a video expert who can help you produce podcasts. This ensures that the end result is exactly what you want and ready for publishing on schedule.

These are the main benefits of outsourcing work for your business:

  • Improve efficiency and productivity. Outsourcing work can help you improve workflows for your business since a single person won’t be tasked with doing all the work. You can find the right expert for what you need and enhance productivity.
  • Save time. It’s also a great way to save tons of time in learning new skills and getting the job done. For instance, you don’t have to learn how to create a new logo. Instead, you can simply hire a graphic designer to do the work for you.
  • Cut down on business costs. You can also cut down on overhead costs by hiring experts who already have their equipment and tools ready to go. For instance, a graphic designer will already have their own visual art software ready to go whereas if you wanted to do it yourself or get it done from team members, you’d have to purchase the software first.

10 important tasks you should outsource to improve productivity

Let’s take a closer look at 10 important tasks you should consider outsourcing as a means to improve productivity and save time.

#1. Responding to emails

As your business grows, so will the total number of emails being sent from and to your business. This doesn’t mean you can stop responding to them.

Instead, you can hire a virtual assistant to take care of all your business emails and respond to them on time. This is a great way to save time and improve efficiency as your virtual assistant can forward you only the emails that need your attention. This way, you don’t have to spend hours going through spam or unimportant emails.

You can even ask the virtual assistant to organize your inbox into different folders. You might have folders for Personal, Business, Confirmations, and Others. This way, you’ll have an easier time going through different types of emails.

#2. Designing a website

If you want your brand to stand out from its competitors, you will need a unique website. Doing it yourself is possible with modern website builders even if you don’t know how to code. However, it can take a lot of time to get it right.

This is why hiring an expert website designer is recommended. They can quickly create a responsive page design that looks far better than some cookie-cutter template. You can ask the web developer to create a user-friendly website that’s easy to navigate. As a result, it can help boost engagement and enhance the user experience on your brand’s site.

#3. Graphics designing

You will also need an expert who can design graphics such as logos, banners, and visual graphics for your business quickly. This is because it’s very time-consuming to create graphics regularly especially if you want to make your website look good but don’t really have the time to do so.

You can also use many robust tools and services to create graphics for your business. But it might not help you create engaging visual content and you also don’t want generic-looking content on your website.

#4. Managing your website

With intuitive content management systems, such as WordPress, it’s much easier to create and manage your business’s website. However, you don’t want to be the one dealing with bugs and issues, especially if you have other important responsibilities for managing your business.

Outsourcing the work to a website expert is a much better option as they can help you install themes and plugins on your website and make sure everything is up to date. They can also help you keep your site secure.

#5. Operating and managing social media platforms

You may also want to hire a social media manager to help you operate and manage all social media accounts for your business. This also helps you effectively create and run social media strategies for your business.

It’s important to send out your message across all social media platforms but you don’t want to be the one doing so if you have to take care of other business responsibilities, as well. It’s also great as you don’t have to constantly post updates on social media outlets. As a result, it helps save time and reduces the need for your constant attention.

Social media managers also play an important role in responding to mentions and helping secure new deals and offerings for your business through social media outlets. Many other businesses might reach out to you through social media platforms so you want an expert ready to take care of them. In addition to this, some customers may only be exposed to your brand through social media platforms. This gives them an easy way to reach out to you and interact with your brand.

#6. Link building

Link building is a tactic used to enhance SEO on a web page by inbounding high-priority links to the web page. The goal of doing this is to increase the web page’s relevancy and ranking is SERPs.

It may take you up to a couple of hours just to find high-priority links and embed them into your content. With the help of an SEO expert, you can start link building passively. You don’t have to look for opportunities or brands to collaborate with or get other websites to link your content, the SEO expert will take care of this for you.

#7. Keyword research

One of the most important factors in creating a successful SEO strategy is keyword research. If you don’t know how well specific keywords work or which keywords to optimize for, it can poorly impact your marketing campaigns and the SEO of your website.

An SEO expert can help you find the right keywords. This essentially means that they can help you prioritize keywords that are more relevant to your audience so it helps you get your web pages to rank higher in SERPs.

#8. Creating blog posts

Creating blog posts regularly is challenging, especially if you’re short on time and don’t have the skills to do so. It can take a lot of time to come up with topic ideas, research them, produce the content, and then prepare it into a properly structured blog post.

A well-structured blog post typically contains proper headings, subheadings, and visual aids that help improve the reading experience. Such content is not only favored by readers but also search engines. This is why you should hire a professional content creator who knows how to effectively create content according to your audience and your brand’s tone of voice.

Check out our blog post on what to look for when finding a professional content writer for more information.

#9. Creating promotional content

As your business keeps growing, you will need to find better ways to promote your products or services. You will have to create promotional content such as branded images, infographics, and professional videos for your business to be used in ads, promos, or in your content.

You can hire someone to create visual promotional content so you save time. This way you can focus on promoting your content instead of spending the time and effort in creating it.

#10. Managing schedules

Schedule management is a huge task, especially if you have to run your business operations in parallel. Knowing and managing everything from little tasks to big ones can be difficult and time-consuming.

You can let your virtual assistant handle appointing time slots for meetings, handling all your business’s documents and files, and making sure everything is pre-arranged for your business’s events.

Conclusion

Outsourcing work to free up more time for yourself means that you can focus on growing your business. People with the right skills can do a task much quicker and enhance productivity for your business.

What are some other important tasks that should be outsourced to improve productivity? Let us know in the comments box below.