“If you’re not great at marketing your business, are you better to push yourself to learn how to do it, or just contract it out?”
My question here is, “Contract it out to whom?”
You see the place that most people would go to would be a marketing consultant – someone with a packet of alphabet soup after their name. Now that might make you feel comfortable, but what about the results? Is there a ‘no gain, no fee’ guarantee?
I ‘contracted in’ by hiring an in-house Marketing Manager with a degree in marketing. He was illiterate, and everything that he wrote had to be rewritten by one of the office staff so that it made sense. I also had to paint the big picture for him so that all he had to do was fill in the minor details because he really had little idea about what to do. He came to me from a similar position with the subsidiary of a public company. I still can’t understand how he got through university.
I have since discovered that the best marketers in the world are predominately self-taught. They have become famous by producing results. Generally, those results were learned in the school of hard knocks while they were building a business.
But the thing that they understood, right from the beginning, was that if you are in any sort of business, it is, first and foremost, the Marketing Business.
No, you’re not in retail; you’re not in manufacturing, importing, service or anything else.
You’re in the Marketing Business!
If you don’t market your products and services then you won’t have a business.
That’s it!
So who should do the marketing? Well, that depends on how much you want to spend, and on how much you want to grow, as a business owner. A good marketer will cost you around $4-5,000 per day, if not per hour, with a money back guarantee to make a % difference to your business. Therefore you need to be prepared to provide the infrastructure for the implementation of the strategies, as it is too costly to have them provide the infrastructure and they don’t want to do it.
Now if you are talking to a marketer that will do everything for you including all the ‘mail-outs’ then you probably haven’t got a very good marketer. Their time is not valuable enough.