&Marketing’s Mascot & Mentor, Chris “The Brain” Hoyt is our guest poster this week, explaining how it’s impossible for a single person to be ‘expert’ in all the various marketing disciplines, and the need for focus and patience. In Chris’ role, he helps our team understand and activate specific marketing tactics for our clients.
Why You Need a Marketing Team:
If you are a human on the Internet, then you probably already know how this article will end. You’re about to read why you ALWAYS need a marketing team, and you should hire OUR marketing team. The rest of this article is just a bunch of obvious drivel justifying the need for you to spend lots of your hard earned money paying a group of Millennials to make Instagram posts for you.
At least, that would be the point of this article if I wasn’t a salty marketing consultant tired of all the junk my industry puts out. The reality is that you probably do need a marketing team, but should start by doing a better job figuring out what you actually need from marketing first.
Stop Hunting Unicorns
The marketing unicorn is a young talented college graduate who can do social media, PR, video editing, web design, copywriting, graphic design, works for under 30K a year, has been guilted into putting off most of their adulthood due to their need to “pay dues” and is told by older businesses people that it is virtuous to only sleep 4 hours a night and work weekends. Of course, not only do these unicorns not really exist (they just fell asleep on their ice cream cones), their positions are not healthy for them or your business.
Doing lots of stuff without a strategy and the willingness to invest time and the expertise to carry them out is insanity. Unicorn or no, marketing is more than doing a lot of things at a surface level to see if anything works. What usually happens is that nothing works (surprise, surprise) and the business starts to think that nothing will work or that they got a faulty unicorn. Sometimes, a business burns through a few unicorns until they start to think, “Hey, maybe we’re doing this wrong?”
Do One Thing Right
I’m going to tell you a big secret in marketing: pretty much anything works over a long enough timeline, and nothing works in a short timeframe. All marketing depends on getting lots of people to make lots of different decisions, and that is the hardest thing in the world to do. Anything you do in marketing requires persistence to catch people’s attention, stick in their thoughts, and meet them at the right time to consider a change.
The best thing you can do in marketing is one thing well. Pick a good medium to reach your audience (hint: usually not Snapchat) and stick to making ads and offers in it. Track them, measure them, and tweak as you go. Once you are getting an ROI, then pick another source. Lather, rinse, repeat. You will get father than vomiting all over the Internet.
Expand Your Marketing Through Expertise
Instead of a unicorn, hire someone who is great at communication and organization. Have this person coordinate with your business, and the world of marketing experts all willing to work in contract roles because they are allergic to cubicles and early mornings. Have a digital marketing analyst run your search marketing. Have a true creative design expert work on your brand. Have a web developer make sure Russia doesn’t get a larger ROI from your site than your business. You seldom need any of these skills full-time, but you do need their full expertise.
Shameless Self-Promotion
Ok, yes, &Marketing is designed for businesses that need diverse marketing experience but are not ready for a full-time in-house team. And yes, I have written this “piece of content” just to grab your attention and put us in a position of “thought leadership.” But at least you know, that I know, that you know.
We may have created a new kind of marketing firm in the hopes of providing businesses the expertise they need, when they need it, without the usual cost and bloat of a traditional agency. That doesn’t mean we are above using a few exploitive old-school tricks along the way. But the truth is that we believe this is a lasting trend, and many small and medium businesses need a team approach versus hoping that a unicorn exists.
