With the plethora of marketing tools and resources available today, particularly online, many small and medium-sized businesses have everything they need at their fingertips to do their own marketing. Or do they?
Digital marketing made easy?
Indeed, whether it’s social media, web, email, digital advertising or even online monitoring, businesses have everything they need to have a ‘DIY’ (do-it-yourself) approach to their online marketing efforts.
And many digital marketing service providers make it even easier by providing video tutorials, online chat sessions with experts and so on to simplify things for businesses. So is taking on your own marketing the way to go in the 21st century?
Surprisingly, we rarely get asked this question and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because companies may not want like the response they’d get from many professional marketers?
Marketing DIY
The reality is that many businesses have the necessary resources to do their own marketing. Companies that have a marketing team or even a few dedicated resources in this area can often accomplish much of what’s required in a highly effective and successful manner.
However, the reality is that corporate downsizing and a reluctance to hire full-time employees due to the fixed costs they represent has left a lot of businesses under-resourced in a number of these areas, in particular marketing and public relations.
Existing staff are often forced to work on projects they’re ill equipped to complete due to a lack of skills, education and experience. This is no more obvious that with the plethora of poorly written websites, print collateral and advertisements. If a business is reluctant to hire a professional copywriter, the same can likely be said for marketers.
21st century marketing getting more complex
The flip side to the digitization of marketing and the easy access many small and medium-sized businesses have to online marketing tools is that this digital phenomenon has also resulted in the exponential growth in the complexity of marketing today – not to mention the expectations from customers in how companies should market to them.
The advent of big data, personalization of marketing, influencer marketing and mobile marketing to name but a few has created a much more complex marketing ecosystem and one where interdependencies have grown tremendously. This creates a more challenging puzzle for the average experienced marketer to keep up with and execute successfully.
Can the average business succeed at DIY marketing?
The answer to this question depends a lot on the business’ expectations for its marketing, not to also mention the complexity of its marketing plan. A more straightforward plan with conservative expectations is more likely to be one that can be successfully managed in-house with minimal resources and experience.
Companies looking to deliver superior results from more intricate and complex marketing plan would be those best suited to having a more knowledgeable and experienced marketing team. They would be able to help the business quantify, evaluate and then tweak their marketing efforts to optimize their performance over time.
Of course with the latter scenario there are more cost-effective alternatives to hiring your own marketing department to fulfill these objectives. A company can hire a dedicated marketing agency or consultancy to help them support many if not all of these tasks.
So it really boils down to your expectations and goals – how aggressive they are and how complicated it will be execute them. Once you know these elements, you should be able to determine if doing marketing the DIY way is the right approach for your business.
If you need help figuring any of this out, please give us a holler. We’d be happy to sit down with you and help you figure out what would truly be the best approach for your business. Happy marketing!!
