The marketing world can be difficult to navigate for a small to medium sized company, even large companies! There are so many options on what you should be doing, how you should be doing it and everything that goes along with those. As BizMilk sees marketing you have 3 choices (realistically 4). Each has a pro and a con, but knowing your choices helps you make an informed choice.
As a smaller business it can be difficult to figure out what is the best way to allocate money. Which choice will bring a profit, happen the fastest, is best for long term results. Each business, not just yours faces these difficult questions. It always seems there is never a definite answer either, which makes the choices you make for your company that much more difficult. Being a small business owner of 2 companies myself, I understand the pain from not knowing what to do and racking different situations through my head many times over to figure out what I should do.
The 4 Choices are:
- Be your own marketing manager
- Hire a marketing manager
- Hire a marketing agency
- 4th – Do nothing
The above are the 3 different scenarios, 4 if you count doing nothing a small business can do for marketing. Below we will go over each one into detail on why they are good or why they can be bad. Just like Rich mentioned in the video above, this is the 21st century and customers are all we care about – which plan is best to get you those customers?
Be Your Own Marketing Manager
You want to save money and do your own marketing, that is fine. Actually saving money as a small business in certain situations is great. Every dollar saved in a small business is a dollar earned. In-fact not spending a dollar as a small business if not needed is the easiest way to make money. To make a dollar you need about $2-$4 in revenue to make your money back. It is just easier to cut money out that is not helping grow the business.
The problem with doing things yourself is that you only have limited time. Sure, we can all work 80/h a week but being a small business owner is not about working more hours a week. First, you are making less per hour and we only have a finite amount of time each day to work.
The other problem is you now have to learn a new skill that is not in your line of work, which takes up time you do not have to give away for free.
Hire a Marketing Manager
Employees, love them or hate them – there are a set of issues they bring with them to a company. Each employee that works for a company unless directly working to make a profit is a fixed cost that hurts your daily, weekly, and yearly income. Each employee you have can do the following things:
Cons
- more payroll
- more taxes
- more workers company liability
- hard to detach from
- can cause rifts in the company
- needs fixed assets, computer etc.
Pros
- Instant Communication
- Culture
It is obviously nice to have some in house as you can completely control them but with any employee, the question is how much per hour they are generating for you.
Hire a Marketing Manager
Obviously, we at Bizmilk Marketing we think that this is the best option. You get all the perks of the above marketing manager in-house, however, you don’t have the cons.
- Ability to set goals for different action items – traffic amount, web conversion, pageview targets etc. If these are not met have a cut-off or the ability to part ways very easily.
- A full write off without paying more money to taxes for payroll, liability etc. This is a nice option as you save money instantly this way that is not going to the government.
- Ability to have the company on “your team” but without the hassle of someone in your office or place of work.
- Offers insight and different perspective from someone – not a group think. Having some push-back from people on ideas is always a great opportunity to not waste money.
Small businesses who we work with always seem to worry about hiring out to a marketing agency, but by the years end (people who stick with the full marketing plan and do not waver) they are incredibly happy with the results. The absolute best part of a marketing agency, such as Bizmilk – we can see a path and direction needed to make results happen. Our company has done work for hundreds of other companies and have the experience needed to make results. As marketing is our job, we can clearly see a path to you beating competition. A company that is not massive that is doing their own marketing is losing in more ways that you might realize. Marketing in-house is juice not worth the squeeze.
