Owners of many digital marketing agencies in the US started as solopreneuers. In other words they worked as a one-man show till they reached a definite revenue goal, or worked as workaholics, till they could afford to outsource.
How did outsourcing come about?
Outsourcing to a WordPress development company became essential for their growth very soon, because, let’s face it, the number of hours in a day is fixed, so there is a limit to what they could physically do and earn by way of an income as a solopreneuer. And secondly, they realized that by hiring employees entitled to benefit programs, was both expensive and time-consuming.
How did outsourcing to a WordPress development company come about?
Thus, began the process of outsourcing to a WordPress development company, first as a trickle and now quite mature, broad-based and spanning multiple technologies and platforms.
By outsourcing to a WordPress development company, a digital marketing agency is able to hire experienced WordPress developers who have the skill-set to build easy-to-navigate, custom, native, and hand-coded websites. The WordPress platform is already very intuitive, robust, and user-oriented and the developers are easily able to utilize it’s full potential and build professional class, robust and stable websites.
Engaging a WordPress development company to scale your business
Some digital marketing agencies that are new to outsourcing might find it somewhat difficult in the beginning to execute day-to-day tasks, but by following some guidelines they can avoid the teething problems and infact scale up their operations very seamlessly.
Identify your needs and goals
Be very clear of what you want to accomplish by engaging with a WordPress development company.
Is your plan to focus just on strategy and outsource the core and underlying WordPress development work completely?
If yes, then you need to identify the work that you want to get done and break it up into individual tasks that you can start rolling out with a defined finish date.
Define the project scope
It is a best practice to outline every task that is required to complete the project.
In the initial phase the tasks could also include activities such as onboarding clients in your project management system, setting up development environments, and migrating content from a development environment to a live server.
There could also be important project specific tasks related to design, development, and speed optimization. Other routine tasks include:
– Auditing of backlinks.
– Getting new clients onboard.
– Setting up a development environment.
– Reaching out to web administrators and doing link building.
– Migrating a development site to a live server.
– Tracking your performance and submitting reports.
– Updating WordPress plugins.
– Preparing and compiling your work report.
Typically when a WordPress site is being developed, it is a best practice to break it up into sub-tasks that involve planning, design, development, and migration phases. Within each of these phases, you need to identify individual tasks, define their priority and compile them in a form that can be handed over to a WordPress developer to complete.
Give shape and form to your process
Document your process and make it available to the WordPress development company so that the WordPress developers working in your team understand your system and your expectations and accordingly are able to complete the tasks that you have assigned to them.
The WordPress developers also experience productivity gains as they get clear instructions on the direction that they have to follow for project accomplishment and this removes guesswork and speculation from their work.
Ideally, store your process in the cloud and make updates when required, so that your team always has access to the latest version.
Typically, digital marketing agencies combine a lot of tools, templates, documents and videos as part of their process documentation.
Hire an offshore WordPress development company
To maximize your revenue and reap arbitrage benefits, it is best to hire an offshore WordPress development company. Local US based developers are firstly difficult to hire and cost more as you have to offer them employment benefits as well.
The downside with offshore developers is that there could be language barriers, cultural and time zone differences and lack of motivation and commitment. The latter part can however be addressed through training and motivational lessons.
In order to hire the best way to reach the WordPress development company directly via email or by making a phone call.
Focus on communication
Make sure that you effectively communicate your expectations to the WordPress development company at the start of your project. The benefit of doing this is that everyone stays on the same page throughout the project and there is a clear alignment between expectations and performance.
A motivated team means that productivity is high, deliveries are on time, and there is no escalation. This in turn ensures that your projects go smoothly and profitability, client satisfaction is optimized and your digital marketing agency continues to grow.
New-gen project management and communication tools ensure that communication is through the system, there are no chances of errors creeping through, or things falling through the cracks. Further all project related documentation remains with the project and can be reviewed later on as well when required.
Measure the performance
Measure the performance of the WordPress development company objectively. This is to ensure that they are working as per your expectations and are not facing any issues.
By having a transparent exchange of feedback, you can pro-actively address issues that your team is facing and resolve them. In this process your team will have a greater job satisfaction, will perform better, and stay with you longer.
It is also a good idea to establish KPIs and measure their performance against those KPIs. The important part here is to have a fail proof mechanism whereby you can take remedial action in case a KPI has been achieved but it fails to have any impact on the business of your clients.
Scale up the engagement
Once you have established a process with your WordPress development company and it is working well, then it is time to scale up and take it to the next level.
At this point you can add more WordPress developers to the team, so that they are ready and trained to take up new projects. This will also ensure that you are able to meet the needs of your new customers and grow your business with them.
Conclusion
Throughout the process, it is important to ensure that you follow the above-mentioned guidelines. As you are trying to balance different elements such as your clients, your internal team, the various tools & technologies and your own competitors, chances are that in this journey you might end up breaking the process.
Therefore, you need to be very careful as you scale up.