How to Find a Marketing Solution That Works for Your Business
You’ve probably heard the phrase you have to spend money to make money. At the same time, every business owner wants to find ways to cut overhead costs and increase revenue (yes, even us). However, the marketing department usually takes the brunt of those cost-cutting efforts – which is ironic because in many cases, cutting marketing and advertising from expenses results in a direct impact on leads and sales.
Let’s dig into some key questions to ask yourself before you cut marketing from your budget.
Do you have the time to market your business?
If you’re in a pinch and need to reduce expenses, know that it’s not wise to completely cut marketing your business. If you have a dedicated person on staff to market your business, and think the best route is to lay that individual off, who will continue to market your business? Is it the business owner? The administrative assistant? The office manager? Who will continue to wear that hat because you can’t just stop all efforts? Someone needs to be accountable for the marketing seat, the question is who will do it.
If you and the rest of your staff don’t have the bandwidth to do the marketing tasks, could bringing on a marketing agency to serve as your marketing department be a solution?
Do you even like marketing your business?
If you choose to take on marketing your business yourself, then ask yourself if you even want to do it. We get it, not everyone has a passion for marketing. Just like some don’t have a passion for accounting or sales. It’s important to like doing the task. This is part of the EOS mindset in evaluating if you Get it, Want it, and Can do it (GWC). Just because you get it, and can do it, doesn’t mean you WANT to do it.
When it comes to social media and blogging, passion plays a big role. Today's consumers are smart and can see through phony marketing tactics, inauthentic engagement, and lack of passion. The passion not only for what you do, but also for marketing it, will shine in your content. But if that passion isn't there, your content might fall flat, not reach the right people, or worse yet, create backlash.
Do you have the resources to market your business?
Outsourcing your marketing to an agency (like Elevate) gives you access to resources that you might not have otherwise. All of these resources take a lot of time and money to accumulate as a business whose specialty is not marketing:
Scheduling tools
Best practices
Industry updates and newsworthy information
Graphic design tools
The expertise and skillset to create content that works
But as an agency, we have all of these tools already at our disposal which allows for more efficient and effective marketing with less effort.
Do you have the knowledge to market your business?
Another major factor to consider is your ability to keep up with the latest trends. Social media is one of the most quickly changing marketing platforms, and it's very easy to follow not only behind trends but also behind best practices. Best practices are changing frequently these days, and if it's not your full-time job to be monitoring them, it's likely you'll miss a change or two.
Further yet, do you have the knowledge to make edits and changes to your website? Do you know how to properly measure your successes? How do you know if you’re winning? Do you know how to set up and run a Facebook, LinkedIn or Google Ad? Circling back around to the EOS mindset, this is the GET IT part of Get it, Want it, Can do it.
If you don’t understand how to do it, it may end up costing you just as much in time for you to figure out how to do these things.
Outsourcing isn’t a dirty word.
If we haven't scared you away from marketing your own business yet, there is hope for those who want to take this on themselves! Elevate has several training options available for business owners like you and your team, to sharpen their marketing skills, create strategies that work, and develop plans for implementation.
And if you don’t have a dedicated marketing team member you want to enroll in one of our training courses, then it might be time we discuss what a Virtual Marketing Coordinator could look like for you.