It’s been a long day. You’ve sat through multiple meetings, reviewed and signed off on payroll, spent time coaching one of your sales reps and finally left the office well after dinnertime. Now, you’re perched on your sofa, eating warmed-up leftovers and trying to look through some SEO best practices your assistant found online.
As you get to topics like keyword research and backlinks, your eyes start to glaze over. It’s late, and you’ve got an even busier day tomorrow.
Sound familiar? It’s no wonder that you’ve adopted a DIY approach to marketing. After all, it takes a combination of knowledge, skill and gumption to start any small business, so creating a marketing strategy might naturally seem like the next task to tackle.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Here are a few reasons why DIY marketing might be a good place to say NO:
Marketing Isn’t Just One Thing. Marketing is a blanket term, but there are many disciplines within the industry. Consider web development, graphic design, copywriting, strategy, search engine optimization, social media management, video production…the list goes on. The analytics involved with marketing require extensive training to make use of insights, and the analytics differ for each platform.
You won’t find a team of marketing specialists with identical skills at a marketing agency; they are going to be individuals who complement one another with their expertise. Anyone who attempts all areas of marketing will end up as a “jack of all trades, master of none.”
There’s an illusion that anyone can do marketing. You can find blogs that promise “5 Marketing Hacks for DIY Success,” and so on. And if you’re scrolling through social media, the ads and posts can seem deceptively casual and laid-back. There’s quite a lot of work behind those seemingly effortless brands’ social media strategies.
What you don’t see are the social media calendars, the topic brainstorming, target audience research and platform analytics. Anyone can do marketing; to do it well requires a lot of time and training.
DIY Eats Up a Lot of (Valuable) Time. Speaking of time and training, DIY marketing can be costly in terms of opportunity cost. Just to become fluent in search engine optimization or Google Analytics requires a hefty investment of time. What is it costing you?
You might have found a free course in keyword research or gathered your team to do some brainstorming for content topics to launch your new blog. But what would you have been doing with that time? Tightening up production processes? Or maybe meeting with a potential business partner. There are so many things vying for your time as a business owner, so choosing the right priorities may not lead you to DIY marketing.
There’s no Strategy. One of the most common pitfalls of DIY marketing is that business owners, with little time to do deep research, end up chasing marketing trends. It’s hard to keep up with changes in marketing and especially to recognize the difference between a fad and a trend with staying power. Even if you have a comprehensive strategy guiding your marketing techniques, it can be too easy to disregard it and chase another fad.
Your Analytics are Just Shiny. DIY marketers often get hung up on analytics that are fun, but not valuable. For instance, counting the number of likes and follows isn’t all there is when you are trying to meet your marketing goals. But business owners often mistake these as indicators of coming growth.
If you’re trying to grow your business, you’re going to want to measure activity like traffic to your website that came from social media or click-throughs on your email newsletter. You can learn a lot about your website from measuring bounce rates and seeing which pages tend to lead visitors to click away.
Analytics are essential for your marketing strategy, but they have to be the right analytics for what you are trying to accomplish.
Your Standards for Consistency Fall Short. Many business owners do things with their colors and logo that make an experienced marketing specialist cringe. And that’s just the tiniest start to the problem of consistency. You not only need visual consistency, but you must have a consistent tone in every communication.
Beyond branding, consistency is an ocean. Your social media, email marketing and content creation: all must be created according to a predetermined schedule, with messages overlapping across touchpoints.
Your audience is constantly evaluating whether your brand can be trusted. By providing a consistent look, feel and experience, your potential customers are increasingly trusting you to do what you say you will do.
When you embrace a DIY approach to marketing, there are going to be times when posting on social media or writing your weekly blog simply falls down the priority list. In the short term, there are always going to be items on your list much more critical than sticking to your social media schedule.
But in the long run, marketing is critical to the growth of your business, and consistency is what helps you continually move toward your growth goals.
It’s Hard to Get a Bird’s-Eye View. When you do all of your marketing in-house, you struggle to see your company and your brand in the context of your market. You will also lack the knowledge of trends and techniques that are working for businesses like yours and why. When you outsource your marketing, you get access to a specialist who has worked with a lot of businesses across many industries and has a good knowledge of techniques that work in different situations.
At SJC Marketing, we’re a small business, too. We understand why companies like yours pursue a DIY marketing strategy. But after decades in the industry, we see some patterns in common DIY missteps, and we can help you redirect and have more success reaching your goals.
Let’s grab a cup of coffee and talk about where your business is headed. No hard sell, just a conversation. Contact us today to see if SJC might be a good fit for your business.