How many of you service your own car? How many business owners manage their own payroll and companies house returns? It’s not that you can’t do these things yourself it’s that the time taken to learn how to do it accurately and effectively is not creating value for you. Marketing for your business should be seen in the same light.

Marketing your business effectively means that you get the right message out to an audience who wants to listen at a time and via a channel that they want to receive messages on. In the digital space at the moment there is an ever increasing about of noise on these channels which means enabling your business to be heard is getting tricker.

Is doing your own marketing a good use of your time and resources?

It’s not impossible for you to run your own marketing but in order for it to be effective and for you to see any real returns on your investment of time and money, you would have to have a good and clear understanding of and how to implement effectively:

• Marketing strategy – the overarching plan of what you want to achieve, how and by when – in measurable terms
• Branding – tone of voice, visual identity, graphic design
• Photography and videography
• Social media business profiles – knowing which channels are right for your audience
• Paid advertising – how to make the best use of your ppc advertising budget
• Email marketing – contact strategies, schedules, content
• Website development and build
• SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
• YouTube as an effective search engine
• Copywriting
• Content creation

Yes you can read blog posts (that’s another aspect of marketing I should have added to the list above), watch video tutorials, there is a great deal of free content available from marketing experts. The Marketing Optimist shares a fair amount of free information in our marketing webinars which will all give you a good understanding of what can be done but there are a couple of things to bear in mind.

You’re the best person to run your business

One is that during the time you are spending learning about the details and technicalities of marketing, you’re not working on the other parts of your business, the bits that only you can do. There was a reason why you started your business, a pain point for your customers that you can solve and that is what you should be focusing on, allowing experts like The Marketing Optimist to concentrate on making sure you’re heard and that people with the problem you set your business up to solve, know you’re there and that you’re the best at what you do.

The second is that whilst you may be able to complete some of the tasks and in fact most can easily create a Facebook Business Page, join some networking groups, investigate the Facebook Business Suite and how to use it effectively; how likely is it that you’ll fully get to grips with the advert creation, effective copywriting of the advert, keyword targeting and utilisation and ideal audience targeting to make whatever budget you decide to invest worthwhile?

You can use an ‘off the shelf’ platform to create a really beautiful website, even add e-commerce to it fairly simply, but do you have the time to learn how to optimise each and every page and image for your targeted keywords? How to write the content of each page to ensure that the search engines start to organically identify your website as one they should be directing traffic to? If you’re running a successful business (that isn’t a marketing business), I would have to say the answer should be ‘No’.

Let The Marketing Optimist take care of your Marketing

At Marketing Optimist we are experts in all fields of marketing, and where we need to employ the skills of other experts (product photography, videography for example) we have a great network of freelancers who we know are at the top of their game in their profession.

When you’re running your business you really shouldn’t be trying to do it all yourself.

Let us help you by booking a free marketing consultation so we can advise where best to invest your marketing budget.