There’s a battle in many businesses over this question. Should a business do their own digital marketing, or hire a consultant or marketing company to take care of their marketing? And if it’s in house, should it be done by an internal hire, or by the business owner him/herself?
The answer boils down to a couple of questions – how much time do you want to free up to do other things in your business, and what are you weaknesses that others can focus on so you can focus on your strengths and passion?
For example, if you’re in the realty business helping people buy and sell homes, which would you rather do? Help your clients with their home; spending time with the client; showing them homes, etc.; or spend a lot of your time finding clients? Are you good at marketing and is that one of your strongsuits? If it is, then great! Maybe you’re really in the marketing business and you provide the client service to make money, but marketing is your passion.
Or maybe spending time with clients is your passion and you want to focus on studying the real estate market and work with clients to buy and sell homes, and marketing is just in the way of doing what you want to do.
If that’s the case, then it makes more sense to have someone help you with your marketing efforts. Just starting off in business, you’re everything. The buck stops with you. You’re the marketer, the CEO, the bookkeeper, etc. But as your business grows, you must also grow your time. There comes a point where it takes too much time to service the clients and do all the other activities in your business. You can hire a bookkeeper for a few hours a week, freeing those hours up to focus on servicing clients.
Then, as your business grows all the more, ideally you would get help to do your marketing, freeing up even more time to focus on your strengths.
Should Your Marketing Help Be a Marketing Company, or an Employee of Your Own Company?
While you can certainly hire someone internally in your company to help with your digital marketing and other forms of marketing that you do, you have to spend time training them, they have to learn about your company and goals, and they have to keep up with the industry and what works and what doesn’t. The advantage is that focus on your business goals and align them with the marketing strategy. But at first, there will be a lot of uncertainty regarding whether or not they can perform well enough to ensure a good ROI for your business.
Hiring a Digital Marketing company to help with your digital marketing is like going to your doctor so he/she can consult with you on your health. A digital marketing company is like a marketing doctor; finding any marketing holes in your business, helping to craft a message for your audience, and diagnosing problems and weaknesses within your business- the providing the right ‘prescription’ to help your business grow with the right kind of marketing.
Digital Marketing is More Involved Than Traditional Marketing
Over the years I’ve heard many business owners say, “I can set up a Facebook campaign, why should I pay you?” or something along those lines of them being able to do it themselves and not have to pay someone. In fact I’ve even had clients that I’ve run campaigns for, who later on fire me so they could do it themselves. They copy the pictures and ad copy and run it through their own Facebook page. Inevitably they come back and ask me for their help again, which I’m happy to do, after they realized how much goes into managing an online digital marketing campaign.
Traditional forms of advertising are usually fairly straightforward- craft a message, then buy a spot on a billboard, TV, radio, or paper ad. Then set it and forget it and see if any leads come through. With social media, there is a backend component where you can see how the ad is performing at any given time and what needs to be changed. You can login to the backend and see what the Click Through Rates are, the Cost Per Click, Cost Per Lead, among many other tracking data. This can be used to inform future decisions on advertising and message-crafting.
An in-house marketing person can be trained to do this, and they can learn along the way. But a digital marketing company specializes in social media marketing and advertising and can know exactly what the data says and how to adjust the advertisements to get the lowest cost per lead and the highest value.
Now, companies are still using traditional forms of marketing: word of mouth, paper/print advertising, billboard, radio, TV, networking- all things which are good and will not go away any time soon. However, more and more people are online and spend a lot of their time on Social Media platforms- Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, etc.
And because more people spend their time there, it makes sense to put your business on Social Media where a good portion of your target audience is. While it might not be necessary for some businesses to advertise on social media, businesses that are looking to scale and needing a consistent and continuous flow of leads, advertising on Social Media is one of the best ways to do this.
Cost
Many people wonder what the cost difference is between hiring internal, doing it yourself, or hiring a digital marketing agency. That depends on the market and part of the country you’re in, but if you take an example, say, paying someone full-time $40K per year in salary plus benefits, you hope that they perform in such a way that they get more clients in the door that justifies their pay.
A digital marketing company might cost $1,000 per month for their services, or $12,000 per year. Like a doctor who studies medicine and knows their field very well, a digital marketing agency keeps up with the industry on a daily basis and knows how to read all the numbers behind the advertising campaign. A big advantage is that they can fine-tune your campaign to bring you leads and customers at the lowest cost to ensure a high and predictable ROI. They will also be hands-on with your campaign while you can be hands-off which frees your time and effort to focus on what you’re good at.
You as the owner can run campaigns yourself, which the ad costs as well as your time. If marketing is your strongsuit and passion and you want to spend time doing that, then it could definitely pay off. But if you’re concerned about freeing up your time to do other money-making activities for your business, then it makes sense to hire help.
What if Facebook and Other Social Media Platforms Go Away?
At one point, newspaper advertising was a very lucrative strategy for many local businesses. Cost wasn’t enormous, and it generally brought in a good amount of customers which more than paid for the cost of the newspaper ad. Eventually newspaper circulation went down, only to be replaced by other marketing methods, such as digital marketing.
If Facebook ever went away or even Google (which won’t happen anytime soon) there will still always be a need and many ways to get in front of people. There will be another online platform that will take its place. It’s a matter of knowing where people go and where they like to hang out. Once we know where people hang out most of the time, we know where to advertise to them.
****
However you want to run your marketing campaigns is up to you and what best suits your needs. Of course, me being biased toward digital marketing and using an agency for it, I know the cost benefits and pros of using this strategy as opposed to keeping it in house. But for some businesses and situations, doing it yourself or keeping marketing in house can work just as well. Everyone has their different reasons, so it’s a matter of what best suits your situation.
Some business owners try different things until they find the strategy that works best for them, also a viable strategy. But whatever it is, don’t put marketing on the back burner; it is the lifeblood of any business and needs to have a good deal of effort and time put into it to reap the benefits for you and your business.
