“I’m already paying someone on my team to post to Facebook and Instagram. Isn’t that enough? What can you do differently that he/she isn’t already doing?”
I’ve heard this question before from well-meaning business owners looking to save money and who assign marketing tasks to management, accounting, or finance people already employed on their teams. Generally, this phrase is repeated when I’ve started to chat with them after they’ve shown some exasperation in their results (or lack thereof).
Delegating your social media or any other marketing tactics to someone on your team who doesn’t possess the expertise of how to reach your desired audience is, at best, a potential recipe for mismanaged marketing. At the worst, you risk the very real opportunity of growth for your organization.
Don’t Let a Marketer File Your Taxes
It’s (almost) officially tax season. This time of year, individuals and businesses are starting to gather documents to submit to tax preparation services to help them with their personal and business taxes, just as they do year after year. Many people, once they find a trusted tax preparer, use the same individual or company for years.
As someone paid to write marketing copy, I don’t attempt to mess around with taxes myself. Far too many numbers and the margin of error is too great for my own comfort level. I also recognize that while I could certainly spend time watching YouTube videos and learning how to file taxes myself, I have to place the importance on my own time. For me, for my own values, my time and energy are better spent doing what I’m really good at (not to mention what I love!), and that’s telling stories and creating connections through compelling marketing copy.
I see the value in hiring a CPA to help me with my taxes because the risk is too high for me to attempt to do it myself. I want peace of mind knowing that my taxes are being handled by a professional who has the training to act on my behalf.
What’s Your Marketing Margin of Error?
Let’s go back to the idea of margin of error. (I know–I literally just talked about how math isn’t my thing. Trust me, it’s not. This is just to prove a point.) In statistics, the margin of error tells you how many percentage points your results will differ from the real population value (in case you forgot all your college stats class information like me, a population is the pool of individuals from which a statistical sample is drawn for a study).
Suppose we shifted to thinking about the margin of error as it relates to your marketing plan. How many percentage points do you think your marketing results would differ if implemented by a non-marketing person on your team? What would your confidence level be in this person who picks a random graphic to post on a random social media channel at a random time? What if you wanted to try paid campaigns or write blog posts for your own site?
If your first thought is, “Well, what’s it hurt to try it? Maybe it’ll work?” I’ll say that if you’re honest with what your goals are, you may not be at the right time in your business where you see the actual value of marketing done right, and that’s okay.
But, if your first thought is, “Oh, I’d never thought about it that way before. I don’t know if I want a large margin of error when it comes to whoever’s marketing my business,” then it’s time to get serious about the team you trust to create, implement and manage your marketing strategy.
Why’d You Hire Your Employees?
How did you imagine scaling when you set out to grow your business? What key positions did you know you needed to hire? Human resources? Operations? Accounting? These are all important roles, and typically, they come first in order of importance to make sure that a business can start and run smoothly.
Their expertise in their roles is essential to the success of your business. If you assign them marketing tasks in hopes of saving money or time, you dilute their expertise and risk overwhelming them beyond what they’ve been hired to do.
Marketing Quality = Trained Professionals
Just as your operations, accounting, and human resources professionals are integral to your overall business growth, so is your marketing team. As marketing professionals, we’re passionate about using our broad, unique perspectives to creative, innovative solutions to drive the value of your brand and grow your business. When we start a conversation with a potential client, we explain our role as a team of specialized creatives who can discover your pain points and help you solve them.
Ready to try something different? Reach out to chat with us about how we can help. We can complete a competitive analysis of your business and help you determine which strategies will help you reach your goals.
