What’s the point of spending money with a marketing consultant when you can do your own marketing? Well apart from the fact that I’d be out of a job, there are plenty of reasons why small businesses can be more effective when they outsource their marketing.
As a small business owner you’re probably responsible for pretty much everything and wear many different hats throughout your day. You’re the Managing Director, Finance Director, Sales & Marketing Manager, HR Manager, IT Support – and you provide a PA service to yourself, Have I forgotten anything? I know, I have to do that too!
Lack of marketing focus causes issues
When you’re that involved with your business it can be very difficult to step back and take a clear view – you may not even have the luxury of time to take that step because you are simply too embroiled ‘in’ the business. As a result, it’s all too easy for marketing to slip off the radar, and even more easy if it also happens to be something that’s out of your comfort zone – hands up anyone who puts off doing things they don’t like until tomorrow, the next day, next week, next month, never?
Thought so, I do too!
If you’re unable to properly address the marketing needs of your business and put in place an action plan, your marketing activity becomes sporadic and ineffective – and I’m pretty confident in the belief that it won’t be measured or evaluated either. There just isn’t enough time for all of that. And it doesn’t get your business anywhere fast – the serious downside is that you give your competitors the opportunity to get ahead of you and you never quite achieve your turnover and profit goals.
So why struggle when it’s one element of your business that can easily be outsourced to a marketing consultant.
Outsourcing your marketing is the perfect solution
The advantage of outsourcing marketing is that a professional can come in and take an overview of what’s happening in terms of your marketing efforts (or not), identify the most effective ways in which your particular business can be promoted (some of which you may not have considered or know enough about), develop a clear marketing strategy and action plan, execute them and follow up with analysis, results and further recommendations. They will do their job without having to deal with all the other business clutter, and you will be able to tick a very important task off your long ‘to do’ list and apply yourself more effectively to other running the business or management rather than functional tasks. And the beauty of outsourcing your marketing is that you agree an affordable amount of time to spend, balancing the marketing needs of your business with your available budget.
How outsourced marketing works for one business
On Target Recruitment is a successful specialist sales recruitment business. The business has been going for over 16 years but Managing Director Steve Oldroyd identified that the marketing efforts were lacking: as a team of sales professionals more comfortable with picking up the phone, marketing was simply outside their comfort zone and wasn’t being addressed.
So in late 2009 they engaged my services to undertake a full review of their marketing approach half-day marketing workshop with the full team. The outcome was a structured marketing plan and a regular and ongoing programme of marketing, including enhancement of the website, with a particular focus on search engine optimisation and content development for inbound marketing, an email marketing contact strategy, and a social media strategy looking at how best to use LinkedIn and Twitter effectively for their business.
The results to date have demonstrated the effectiveness of a clear and focused plan: a recent email campaign achieved an ROI of over 8000% and the website traffic and quality of visitors is up month on month, with goal conversion at an all time high.
Steve Oldroyd says: “The marketing strategy is delivering consistently excellent results – on time and to our specification. Outsourcing our marketing has been one of my best decisions to date!”
If you want to grow your business you need to plan ahead
On Target Recruitment is typical of many businesses in recognising that to grow it needed to take the seemingly big step in bringing in a marketing consultant. I believe that marketing outsourcing is the obvious step, providing you with the experience and skills at a fraction of the cost of hiring that individual full time. If it means hitting the ground running to fast-track your marketing and achieve the positive results that On Target experienced it has to be worth the investment.
Some people can wear many hats. But when you haven’t got time to keep swapping them or one doesn’t quite fit it may be a good time to hand it over.
What do you think? Do you find it difficult to do everything? If you think your business might benefit from some marketing direction to find the right approach and actually make your marketing happen why not get in touch for a free, no obligation consultation.
Photo credit: DigitalArt