Small Business Tips Blog

Why You Shouldn’t Do Your Own Business Marketing

Raise your hand if you’re a good juggler. As a small business owner, you’re likely juggling a lot of different balls, often too many at once. From business development and financials to operations, HR, and marketing, you’re trying to balance everything without losing control. But, do you really need to be juggling all parts of your business? What if you could remove one ball?

Let’s look at the marketing ball. There are several reasons why you shouldn’t do your own marketing. According to author Malcolm Gladwell, it takes at least 10,000 hours to become good at something. Hiring a professional would ensure that you are marketing the right message to the right audience at the right time. Planning and implementing a marketing plan requires innate knowledge of the industry and more resources and time than you are able to give if you are running your small business.

Say you did have the know-how, would you have the time or focus? If you’re like most small businesses, you’re busy leading your business, running daily operations, and managing customer and client expectations. Too often, marketing gets pushed to the bottom of a business’s priority list, especially if that business is growing or steady. It takes time to execute marketing strategies on a consistent and ongoing basis. If you hand off your marketing it will be made actionable, sooner rather than later.

We all know first impressions are important. Your marketing is a direct reflection of the value you put on your business. If your marketing looks cheap and is inconsistent, it sends the message that your product or service offering will also be low quality and unreliable.

Getting the professionals to look after your marketing builds credibility, and an outside perspective helps to keep you targeting the audience you intended. If it looks like you did your marketing yourself (i.e., it’s amateurish, low-grade, or content riddled with errors), you risk losing potential customers.

There are a few different options available when you choose not to do your own marketing:

• Hire someone with marketing experience. (You’ll have a resource that’s in-house and focused on you.)
• Outsource it to a marketing company. (This can be less expensive than hiring someone internally.)
• Contract a freelance marketing professional. (They can also help source contacts in the industry.)
• Build a relationship with a marketing consultant or advisor. (Offer lunch in exchange for advice.)

Being a small business owner can, at times, be a wild juggling act, but if you learn to let go of certain responsibilities like marketing, you’ll feel more in control, and be a better juggler, in the long run.

Carmen Morgan
Writing on the Wall