Small business owners are a special breed of people. They work hard, stay focused, and juggle many different activities to keep their business running day after day. The ability to start and keep a small business afloat is admirable, and when a small business thrives, it creates a unique challenge for small business owners. When is it time to finally let go of certain activities to better focus on the larger picture of running and continuing to grow a business? It’s a little different for everyone, but here are a few indicators to help you decide when it’s time to outsource your marketing.
Your marketing activities prevent you from focusing on business growth
To do marketing well for a small business, you need to commit time and resources. As a small business owner, both of those are in limited supply. If you find that you’re spending so much time marketing your business that you’re not able to focus on overall business growth, it’s time to outsource your marketing to a trusted marketing professional. Savvy business owners know it’s more important to work on your business than in your business. Working in your business is anything that’s a job or task, while working on your business is anything strategic: business strategy, marketing strategy, sales strategy, product development, research, etc. Working on your business provides a higher-level return on your efforts than working on, say, social media posts ever will.
You’re not executing effective marketing campaigns
Many small business owners stay busy doing marketing activities without a real plan. You might be able to check the box on how often you post on social media, write a blog post, or send out an email. Still, if you’re not following a marketing plan, measuring the results, and tweaking your activities based on results, you’re not executing effective marketing campaigns, and your results will diminish over time. Marketing is more than busywork; measuring your results, monitoring your competition, and constantly adjusting your overall marketing approach based on observations is what will get you ahead. If you focus too much on tasks and not enough on strategy, your campaigns will never be truly successful.
You can’t keep up with marketing trends, tools, and tactics
Marketing is a highly dynamic field, and the way marketing is implemented constantly shifting and changing. In addition, new platforms and tools are introduced frequently, and not taking advantage of these new tools and tactics can be detrimental. Also, Google and other platforms often shift in how they return results, rank your website, or otherwise impact your marketing. Not keeping up with the last search engine changes can keep your marketing from being effective.
Your marketing efforts don’t work synergistically
Does your blogging, email marketing, social media, and paid ad efforts work seamlessly together, or are they siloed efforts? For many small business owners, not having marketing tactics work to support each other means overall results will fall short. A small business marketing strategy can help, but most busy small business owners simply don’t have the time or expertise to create a marketing plan, let alone execute it effectively.
Results from your marketing have stalled out
If you notice your email subscriber rate has declined, your social media follower engagement and growth has stalled out, or your website traffic is flat, it’s a good indication that your marketing efforts are stalling out overall, which likely means so are the results you should be getting from your efforts. A small business marketing consultant knows how to constantly tweak and refresh marketing efforts, whether it be through new content marketing ideas or trying new marketing tactics.
Your sales are down
The goal of marketing is to generate interest in your product or service. From there, a dedicated sales effort can bring an interested lead into the sales funnel and ideally close the sale for new business. If you find your sales are lagging, one possibility is that your marketing efforts are no longer feeding your sales pipeline. Working with a company or individual who can offer strategic marketing services can help revitalize that sales pipeline and get revenue moving upward again.
It’s an exceedingly difficult step for a small business owner to give up complete control of all aspects of their business, but investing in the process of outsourcing your marketing can help your business grow and thrive in the long run. Is it time to outsource your marketing?
- Marketing Tactics That Your Small Business Can Do for Free - January 10, 2024
- How to Create Images for Your Small Business Website - December 6, 2023
- How Small Businesses Benefit from Referrals - November 6, 2023
