The contestants and the judges on The Great British Baking Show make it look so easy. Pipe some macarons, they say. Add a chocolate collar to that cake. And make sure you’re combining some wacky flavors nobody has ever put together before, but guess what? They’re amazing.
Watching too many hours of baking shows can give you the illusion you’re a great baker, too. That Betty Crocker mix? No, thanks. Nothing but Genoise from scratch for me, thank you. And before you know it, you’re planning to have butterflies flutter out when your cake is cut while creating the first-ever cumin and cinnamon buttercream.
It’s a disaster, one that would send you right home from The Tent. And it might bear a striking resemblance to your marketing.
A Recipe for Marketing
When marketing is done well it looks easy. Deceptively so, just like a fantastic cake. But that doesn’t mean watching it makes you good at it.
Many small businesses try to do marketing in their spare time, writing a blog here and there and posting on social media as they think about it. They might run a promotion now and then or sponsor a local event. There’s nothing wrong with this approach to marketing, except that it could be so much more. It’s the Betty Crocker cake mix approach to marketing.
What if you had a coordinated strategy that effectively drove growth for your business?
It would be one in which social media posts pushed more traffic to your website, which ranked well on search engines because of its amazing design and your SEO strategy.
You would have ads that were reaching your target audience so that they had the information they needed to make a purchase decision.
There are many reasons why a team of professional marketing specialists can help you achieve this better than you can do it in-house. Here are a few of them:
Get a Whole Team of Experts: You might have someone on your team who is pretty active on social media or who has some good ideas about how to make a video. But when you partner with a full-service marketing agency, you get a whole range of marketing experts: videographer, web designer, SEO specialist, email marketing team, content writer, and the list goes on!
This approach effectively scales your marketing efforts. You may hire an in-house specialist, but you’re likely to get an employee who has expertise in a few areas. Instead, you could use that money to get access to a team with a variety of areas of expertise. You improve your marketing ROI while getting more done.
Expand the Conversation: Your in-house marketing team is getting everything accomplished that you want, but even a seasoned team can get in a rut. They may benefit from the energy of working with another set of marketing specialists, brainstorming new ideas and trying out new strategies.
Consistency: One big gaping blind spot for a lot of companies is the need for consistency in marketing. Not only should your logo always be represented in the same way, but even the tone and voice of your communications should be consistent. Marketing teams help you align your entire organization to present yourselves in a way that never waters down your brand.
Time: You might be surprised to find out how much time writing a blog every now and then or posting on social media here and there really takes up. You’ve got a lot to do, and outsourcing your marketing frees up your team to be focused on your goals.
Perspective: Bringing in an outside team of marketers should be a lot of fun. They should be just as excited about where your company is headed as you are. But they should bring something more: a new perspective that introduces new ways to reach audiences, connect with leads and showcase your brand.
The marketing team you work with will have worked with a lot of companies, some like yours and some not at all like yours. Their experience having seen a lot of marketing strategies and how they played out for different types of businesses will help you anticipate and avoid challenges for a more successful set of results.
So, if your approach to marketing has been to throw a few things together and then toss them out there, saying to yourself, “fingers crossed,” like a British baker, it may be time to call in the experts.
We’re not saying we’re the Paul Hollywood of marketing, exactly, but there’s a good chance we are closer than a single person trying to do it all, and that’s a good reason to give us call. Contact us at SJC Marketing to talk over where your business is headed and where you would like to be. Let’s meet for coffee and some delicious, professionally-baked cake made by neither one of us!