DIY Marketing – Biggest small business mistake

DIY Marketing and Hiring Marketers to work In-house is one of the biggest mistakes being made by many Australian small businesses.

Marketing, like most business disciplines is changing rapidly due to advancements in technology, media fragmentation, and the resulting change in consumer wants and behavior.

Increasingly, there are more marketing specialists than ever before and the decreasing number of remaining marketing management generalists have to keep up their knowledge across an increasing array of new channels and tools whilst managing more complex campaigns and measuring and analyzing increasing reams of data on an ever decreasing budget.

Marketers are struggling with issues around Loyalty, CRM, Big Data, Search Engine Marketing (PPC, SEO, Display), Social Media, Content Marketing, PR, UX, etc. And each of these distinctively different disciplines has at least 3-4 different broad areas before one even drills down to specialities!

Yet most SME Marketing Job Descriptions read like a mythical Marketing Super Hero, with marketing job descriptions for a Marketing Manager, Marketing Assistant or Marketing Coordinator encompassing vastly disparate skill sets.

Here’s a typical description for a Marketing Coordinator or Marketing Assistant in a company where this individual is the one and only marketing resource and hence a recipe for disaster, where he or she is expected to:

• Drive Marketing Strategy,
• Develop all Marketing Communications / Content, including Copywriting and Design
• Distribute or Promote the company’s content via PPC, SEO, Social Media and PR, Direct Mail and any media advertising
• Manage the company’s website and all Social Media Assets, from both a content and technical maintenance perspective
• Support the Sales Team and / or Distribution Channels

The sad reality is that most SME business owners do not know what they really need and end up “copy and pasting” from job descriptions they have seen. Due to the fact that most business owners are not professional marketers, they have no idea how to tell a ‘good’ applicant with the appropriate skills, in a few areas they are actually good at, from ‘bad ones’.

At the very best, the SME business owner hires someone who is good in 2 or 3 areas out of the 7 or 8 they have advertised for, effectively investing in a marketing project manager, who will still have to either engage outside marketing specialists or try to do it all themselves. The overall result, no matter which way you slice it, is at best mediocre.

The easiest way to understand this dire situation is to look at the marketing department of a bigger company, where the typical job description above would be performed by 2 or 3 different teams or at the very least 2 or 3 different individuals. Yet small business owners expect one person to perform miracles or worse still believe they can do it themselves.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are exceptions, success stories of entrepreneurs doing their own marketing and doing it brilliantly, but the key word is exceptions. In many cases these entrepreneurs have a marketing background and a real passion for marketing their business. This is not the case in general. Most people go into business to do what they love, being an accountant or an architect, a lawyer, a plumber, a gardener, etc.

According to the Mavenlink infographic Hire or Contract Your Marketing Department there are a number of key criteria that should steer you in the correct direction:

Here is a summary of the factors that would see you lean towards an in-house or hiring solution:

1. Large marketing budget at your disposal
2. Slow to steady rate of growth
3. Very sensitive proprietary information
4. Few Urgent Deadlines
5. You prefer Day-to-Day supervision of all personnel versus a Results Only Work Environment
6. You disagree that media communication has become too complicated.

qubePartners Outsourcing vs In-House Marketing Diagram summarizes the advantages marketing outsourcing can deliver to a small and medium sized enterprise.

For a free and no-obligation assessment of your marketing needs don’t hesitate to call us or alternatively in the first instance you can have a look at the Marketing Check document in our Marketing Resources section.