If you own a small to medium size business, you undoubtedly spend time searching online for helpful tricks and tips to help you master your company’s marketing needs. In fact, if you’ve ever spent any time on the SMA website, you know that we are happy to load you up with everything from Buyer Persona Templates to guides that will help you get your Direct Sales Business moving in the right direction. Our downloads, as well as others that can be found, are great tools for the job (marketing for small businesses) but have you ever stopped and wondered if YOU should be the one utilizing these tools? Moreover, should YOU even be the one doing the job?
Did that question catch you off guard? It’s ok if it did. Most people who were once in the position of needing to run their own marketing campaigns remain in that position for too long because they don’t ask themselves that same question.
Too Big, Too Fast
A lot of small businesses owners start out doing their own marketing. If you weren’t lucky enough to be seeded, or perhaps your never sought outside investments, you probably are working on a tight budget. We all know that when capital is limited an owner is forced to wear many hats, including the hat of a marketing specialist.
Marketing for Small Business Made Easy
It’s great that you can run your company’s marketing by yourself but ask yourself these questions:
- After I have completed my self-assigned marketing tasks do I have enough time left in my day/week to complete all my other tasks?
- Are my marketing efforts enough to satisfy 100% of my marketing needs or am I only accomplishing what I can make time for?
- Am I running everything to the best of my ability and not seeing the results I desire?
These simple but important questions are critical to determining if you need to seek help from an outside professional. If running your company’s marketing campaigns is hampering your ability to run the rest of your company, you will quickly find yourself without a company to market. Additionally, if you have great marketing ideas but have found yourself in a position where you only have time to handle the basics, it might be time to seek outside help.
Don’t Take My Job
But wait! “Please stop writing this blog,” you’re yelling because you are the person in charge of marketing for a small business and are afraid we are talking you out of a job. Relax, you have nothing to worry about. It’s normal for small businesses to have one employee manage and run their overall marketing campaign while utilizing the services of a professional marketing company.
So, if your job is to handle marketing for a small business these are the questions you will want to ask yourself:
- Does my skillset allow me to accomplish everything that my job requires?
- Are the results of my max effort what they need to be for my employer to grow their company?
- How much do I really understand SEO and is it enough to modify existing marketing strategies based on the data my site produces?
Listen, if you’re all about blogging that’s wonderful, but who is handling your graphic design? What about your SEO? Before you say that you deal with the graphic design take a moment and think about how confident you are with that. Writing, SEO, and graphic design are very different skill sets. Some people possess all of these skills and others are strong with one and weak with the others. When you bring a marketing company in, you do so to help fill in the gaps, and NOT to replace you.
It’s best to view a marketing agency as an extension of your small business, working toward your business goals, utilizing today’s best inbound marketing practices to put the power of SEO, social media, content marketing and analytics to work for your business. When you have the means to do so, partnering with an agency can be the next step on your way to taking your business to the next level.
Let’s Recap
When you’re starting out you will want to handle everything that you can, and this will probably include marketing. However, once your budget starts to grow so will your marketing needs while at the same time your available time will start to shrink. If you feel you’ve reached this point, then it may be time to pick up the phone.
