So who’s taking care of your marketing right now?
No, really, who’s taking care of that for you?
If it’s anyone other than you, the business owner, you’re probably screwed, or worse, you don’t even realise you’re screwed. Here’s why.
If your business is turning over less than $3 million a year, you should be handling all marketing. Full stop. No but / what if’s. Sure, you might have a team handle the implementation of said strategy, but at the end of the day you should be responsible for the strategy. Not an agency, not the magical lead fairies, you.
These days though, entrepreneurs seem to be more eager than ever to hand over their marketing to “agencies” who will deliver them leads. It rarely ends well. I mean on the surface it seems like a great deal. Give people some money, they do some ads and deliver you clients. Sounds FANTASTIC, and the agencies KNOW IT.
It makes EVEN MORE sense when you don’t now how to market or don’t know how to generate a lead that someone offering to do that for you is a good thing, but it’s one of the worst things you can do?
BUT WHY?
According to the University of Southpark a business has 3 steps:
Step 1. Collect underpants.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit
In the real world, your business has 3 similar, yet equally important steps.
1 - Generate Leads
2 - Make Sales
3 - Deliver
Rinse and repeat. Boring, but important to do. Fail at one, and your business goes into intensive care. Missing two or more? Your on life support and your time is limited.
So, if you’re thinking your going too outsource your leads to an agency and your sales to a sales page (aka: a computer)…. all that’s left is delivery. Here’s why this is a problem...
Would you relinquish control of the delivery of your product or service to someone other than you? Would you just pay them some cash and hope they deliver to your standards, because you weren’t sure how to do it yourself?
I bet you wouldn’t. I bet when you hired someone you’d be making sure they were doing everything exactly the way they need to, following your exact process, or delivering to your high standards. You’d probably call me crazy if I suggested you outsourced your delivery if you didn’t know how to deliver yourself.
Yet people frequently want to outsource their lead generation and sales…. I talk to them on the phone every day.
I mean I get it...
I get that you want an automated money printing machine with no effort. I mean who wouldn’t want to get paid to do absolutely nothing. I’d love to never go to the gym and have 6-pack abs and have muscles that rip apart t-shirts all while outsourcing my nutrition to the local take away joint.
Same goes with your marketing. Just because someone is offering to do all these things for you doesn’t mean it’s a smart choice. What happens when something goes wrong? What happens when the leads stop coming in? You won’t know how to evaluate them or troubleshoot problems. You won’t know what to do because you never learned what to do in the first place.
Agencies KNOW THIS and that you’re clueless as to what their metrics or ROI should be. I especially love the ones that say you can’t get ROI from social and thats not the point of social advertising. Of course they wouldn’t want it to be the point.
That way they don’t have to DO anything apart from spend your money on ads and show you how much BRAND RECOGNITION you got.
Your far better off getting educated and learning what is involved, doing it yourself and learning how it works. THEN you can have someone handle it so they can manage it to your expectations.
One of my best mentors is constantly saying “Don’t be looking for the easy way, be looking for how to get better”. There is no easy way, no short cuts, no cheat codes.
If you don’t know how to market, learn. I did it, you can do it too.
…and for the record, building landing pages is NOT marketing, it is ADMIN.
