As a growing business, there comes a point where you grow beyond your own time, effort, and skill set. That’s always a good thing!
It’s normal to feel a little putout at first when someone mentions hiring outside marketing help. As a business, there is nothing else that makes your heart bleed a little when someone tells you that what you’ve been producing is under par, and a little twist of the knife at the thought of spending money to do it.
Here are some reasons to help put that anxiety to bed!
Remember, you got your business to where it is, but you need to start spending your time where it counts: growing!
Marketing is the nitty-gritty, time-sucking, nasty, boring research that you really don’t want to do. It can literally eat away at your day. Six hours on Google trying to figure out WHAT to say, HOW to say it, WHERE to put it, and WHO to tell it to and then, you still have to do a lot of designing around those questions! Marketing firms are equipped with workers, interns, and professionals that all have talents in separate areas. When a new project comes in, these areas are all assigned to the appropriate expert. What takes you six hours just took six people one hour. Be honest with yourself: can you realistically create a marketing strategy AND run a company, AND check the profit and loss, AND keep up with sales…and whew! We just ran out of breath trying to say it all! Your top priority is to ensure your business keeps going.
Let’s face it: as a business owner, your entrepreneurial dreams didn’t include landing pages, email newsletters, and remembering sixteen passwords to social media accounts you didn’t even know EXISTED.
As strange as it sounds, there are people in the world who THRIVE on this kind of work. They enjoy designing those emails; they get excited to spend hours on social media…and so they get jobs at marketing and creative agencies to feed that desire. Wouldn’t someone who enjoys doing those things better serve your business? Not to mention they’re just probably better at it than you. That isn’t to say you couldn’t be good at it too, but how much HTML do you know to create an email newsletter? How much do you WANT to know about what time is the best time to post on Facebook or what types of images perform best on Instagram? Marketing and creative agencies know this…this is THEIR business. They go to boring Google conferences to know it.
Okay, so you HAVE decent marketing. You think. Do you know what’s working?
We’ve all heard the phrase work smarter, not harder. There is a point when some things are just fruitless. Where are your leads coming from? Phone? Email? Internet? Newsletter? Word of mouth? That new direct mail piece you sent? A YouTube video? What if 60% of your business came from LinkedIn? Wouldn’t you like to know where that business comes from so you can trim the fat in areas that it doesn’t work? For example, if video is 50% of your leads and an email newsletter is 4%, maybe it pays to spend more money on video, and send out fewer emails. You would never know though, because you most likely don’t know how to measure these statistics, or you aren’t paying attention to your ROI. A marketing agency pays attention and sends you monthly reports on what works and what doesn’t.
So you would LOVE a marketing firm to handle it for you, but it’s just so expensive!
So the plan is to hit up Craigslist and to see what floats into the inbox for twelve bucks an hour. There are pros and cons to this. On the one hand you might save a ton of money on payroll…but you are going to watch your sales go stagnant in the process. We don’t have anything against hiring interns, but you do get what you pay for. A professional marketer, content editor, social media manager, graphic designer, and website developer get pricey pretty fast. Remember, when you hire a professional firm to handle your needs, you are getting every single one of these professionals at contractor pricing. You are only going to pay for what you use. Most of the time, this is going to be less than if you were to hire one professional, full-time employee.
Where are you at in your marketing efforts? Are they ok? Could they be better? If you aren’t sure or would like to discuss some options, call us! We can help walk you through some tough decisions.
