Large corporations have their “aces in their places”. What does that mean? It means they hire people with a particular set of skills to handle tasks within their skill sets. As a small business owners you may be working with a much smaller budget. Because of this restraint, you either try to fulfill a lot of needs for your company yourself or you have a very small staff filling several roles. The biggest problem with this is that while you may be saving money on staff, because you do not have people with the right skills in the right roles –YOU ARE ACTUALLY LOSING MONEY.
Marketing is one of those areas in business that takes a monetary investment, but positions your company to make a return on that investment. Marketing is about building relationships (see more information on that HERE). However, if you do not have the right person handling your marketing, then you are hindering your company’s ability to receive a return on your investment… Here are five reasons you need to outsource the marketing for your business.
- You do not have time to do marketing yourself. For small business owners, time is literally money. You do not make money unless you spend your time servicing your clients or preparing your products for your clients. That is your full-time focus and if you were honest with yourself, you do not have time to handle much of anything else.
- You do not have a marketing plan. Because marketing is not your skill set, you do not even begin to understand how to formulate the plan needed to effectively market your business. Just willy-nilly putting out disjointed stuff and calling it marketing is not properly positioning your company to attract more business. You need a blueprint that is specific to your company’s needs.
- You do not have a marketing strategy. Having a plan is just the beginning. You have to know how to execute the plan in a way that makes sense for your business and your business goals. Marketing includes a mix of social media and traditional marketing. How much of each works best for your business? What technique within each category works best for your products or services? All of this is included in the strategy that an expert would put together for you.
- You are not talking to the right people and/or using the right marketing messaging. This is a big one. You have to know who your target customers are, why they need you, and how to “talk” to them with your marketing messaging. Most small businesses try to speak to everyone because they want everyone to buy their products and services. Their thinking is that to speak to everyone is to create more opportunities to make money from more people. The problem with this is that not having specific messaging, very few people are paying attention to your marketing to take advantage of your offers. Think about CPR training. In that training you are instructed to single out one person to go get help as you perform the lifesaving maneuver. There may be a crowd gathered around, but unless you are specific about who is needed to help, your message will be confusing, misinterpreted, and non-effective. A Target Audience Profile will detail out exactly who you are speaking to and identify what language to use in your messaging so that they know you are talking to them.
- You are not consistent with your marketing efforts. In the first reason, we stated that as a small business owner you do not have time to run your business and market it. Focusing on product and/or service fulfillment is a full-time job in and of itself. How effective would you be attempting to add the additional full-time duties that marketing takes to be impactful to your plate? Great marketing includes routine efforts to consistently get your message and offers in front of your target audience. While watching any of your favorite television shows, I’m sure you have noticed that some of the same commercials are replayed during the hour your show is on. In just an hour they have marketed to you twice or three times. How often are you able to market if you already have the full-time job of running your business? I can answer for you, not often enough for the conversions into sales that you would like.
Outsourcing your marketing is a step toward leveling up your business and its success. I would love to talk to you more about how I can be your Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), while you focus on being the CEO that you are. Let’s talk about your return on marketing investment; go HERE.
