7 Signs You’re Over DIY Marketing
With marketing, just because you can do it yourself doesn’t mean you can do it well.
Modern marketing tools can be deceptively user-friendly. Because everyone has access to free tools like blogging and social media, hands-on business owners
feel like they should be handling them on their own – or at least that someone in the office should be able to handle it.
Hey, that makes all the sense in the world when your business is just getting started or is still small and growing. If you don’t have much of a marketing
budget, every little bit that you can do yourself helps.
But just because DIY marketing is possible doesn’t mean that it gets the best results – especially as your business grows and your marketing doesn’t grow
with it. If you’re noticing these frustrations when it comes to time, sales, and production, it’s a sign that you’re reaching the end of DIY marketing.
1. You don’t have any time to do your marketing.
Are you finding that blogging, updating social media, placing ads, and other marketing tasks just never seem to get crossed off your list? You have a business
to run, after all – and marketing it can be a full-time job on its own.
When you are too busy with the core functions of your business, it can be hard to take time for effective, consistent marketing. But without a strong marketing
presence, it can be almost impossible to bring in the volume of new business you need to continue to sustain you.
DIY marketing may have helped you get a bunch of new customers through the door – but if you’re having to put off your marketing to handle them all, your
marketing (and growth) are going to stall.
2. Your sales are down because you’re focusing more on marketing than on your business.
If your response to problem sign #1 is to throw yourself back into your DIY marketing, you’ll find yourself struggling with this problem next. As your
marketing and your business grow, it becomes more and more difficult to balance the two of them yourself. At some point, there are only so many hours
in a day.
To make the best use of your talents, you should be dedicating your hands-on time to the things you do best: the core functions of your company, especially
sales. Spending hours on marketing efforts takes valuable time away from your actual business, leading to unneeded stress. By handing the reigns over
to savvy marketing experts, you can spend your valuable time doing only that which works best for you and your company.
3. You are doing only one kind of marketing, rather than diversifying.
Do you have an active, engaged Twitter feed, but you’ve never gotten around to making a Facebook page or a blog? Often, business owners who either don’t
have time for their marketing or don’t want it to take time away from their business will react by focusing only on
one or two kinds of marketing.
But if you understand what makes digital marketing successful, you know that doing one or two kinds of marketing just doesn’t work. To be truly effective,
you need to diversify your marketing to reach the widest audience possible. When you work with a marketing agency, they can dedicate an entire team
of skilled marketers to ensure that all your bases are covered.
4. Your sales team says they’re not getting leads from your marketing channels because you’re only doing a little bit of everything.
Your last blog post was six months ago, you only tweet when you think about it, and you still haven’t made that Instagram account. “Diversifying your marketing”
doesn’t just mean doing a little bit of a lot of kinds of marketing. Infrequent updating and neglected accounts can actually hurt your business online,
as these are often red flags to customers of non-serious or even scammy businesses.
It’s also difficult to grow or even generate sales from any particular marketing channel when you only invest a little in it. Rather than consistently
driving potential customers into your sales funnel with your marketing, you’re just catching whoever lands in your net at that moment. That’s just
not sustainable for long-term growth and success.
5. You are always scrambling to do the “next big thing” in marketing, and getting frustrated by the learning curve.
Have you ever spent hours trying to set up a social media aggregator or another online resource because you are not familiar with the technology? Those
hours you spent chip away at your time spent on the core functions of your company. Instead of trying to learn every new thing that comes along, why
not hand it off to someone who has already developed the needed skills? Not only does it free you up for more important tasks, it will streamline the
process because they already know what they are doing.
6. You want to grow your sales, but you don’t have the manpower or the resources to grow your marketing.
Sales growth doesn’t just magically happen; you need a concerted marketing effort to find the customers who need you and just don’t know it yet. But that
kind of marketing takes time, equipment, and specialized knowledge. Skilled marketing professionals can interpret your ideas into action. By describing
what you want to do to the professionals at a dedicated marketing agency, you can see your great idea put into motion to benefit your business.
7. Your competitors are doing more with their marketing and getting better results.
It can be incredibly frustrating to look online or in your mailbox and see a clever, effective marketing campaign that came from your competitor. Development
of great marketing ideas can take time, experience, and resources that most businesses can’t afford to spare. By hiring someone to develop your campaigns
for you, you can be the one who has the killer campaign while your competitor says, “Why didn’t I think of that?!”
When You’ve Reached Your Limit, Call in the Pros
Here’s the thing with all the warning signs we’ve discussed in this post: it all comes down to how much time you or your employees have to commit to
your marketing. If you’ve hit the maximum of time that you can dedicate to your marketing, your response shouldn’t be to start cutting corners with
your marketing or your business. It should be to find a person or an agency that can dedicate the time that your marketing needs and focus on gaining
the knowledge and experience that gets you better marketing.
You care about your company and you want everything done right. This can often make you feel that the best way to get something done is to do it yourself.
But smart professionals know when to handle something on their own and when to delegate the task to someone else who possesses the time, skills, and
resources needed to accomplish it efficiently.
If you are finding that your marketing efforts are not working as well as you would like, consider handing the job to a dedicated marketing agency.
They can handle your promotional presence while you dedicate yourself to your company and the things that you do best.
