Make It With Michael

By Catherine Park Outsourcing is the not-so-secret weapon many successful entrepreneurs and companies use to decrease their costs, by allotting a portion of their work to a third party. When done properly, outsourcing can lower your bottom line as well as raise your productivity . Outsourcing can be done domestically or by contracting an offshore solution provider (often known as offshoring). If you’ve always wanted to know more about outsourcing but haven’t really got a handle on how it can help you, read on to learn how you can exploit this growth hack . Why should I outsource? Outsourcing provides many different advantages, and can be especially beneficial for small businesses. Apart from saving costs, outsourcing gives you more options and time. What should I outsource? Before implementing outsourcing into your business plan, you should first examine your core activities and key focus. Think about the essential functions of your business – the ones that don’t affect core ...

By Emily Copp When you’re running a social media ad campaign, the right toolkit will keep all your well-laid plans running effectively. We chatted with our social marketing specialist Gabrielle Maheux about the tools she uses when managing Hootsuite’s own social ad efforts. A toolkit for social ads managers AdEspresso by Hootsuite AdEspresso by Hootsuite allows us to do a number of important things with our ads. First off, we can run split test ad sets, which is key to running the most cost-effective campaign. Within a few days of the start of a campaign we know what ad copy and creative is performing best and why—allowing us to optimize the campaign. In our ad dashboard, we get an overview of performance over time, top tracking metrics, total amount spent, conversions, and the best and worst performing ads. We can easily pinpoint ads that are not working for us. AdEspresso also allows us to boost posts directly from the Hootsuite dashboard. This makes it easy to put money beh...