When you're trying to grow a business, you need to give a little, to gain a little. Meaning you need to devote some of your time and money towards marketing to gain more business and gain more awareness of your services or products.
So if you find yourself in the middle of an identity crisis, read on for the signs that it might be time to call on the help of a marketing firm to make your marketing more streamlined, and your business life more efficient.
1. You're not ready to pull together a creative team. Interviewing, hiring and managing the efforts of several creatives is no easy task, either. Not only is paying the overhead for an in-house creative team unwieldy for some, but once you have that team, you must orchestrate their efforts so they produce what you're looking for.
2. You don't have time to keep branding consistent. This is more than making sure the logo is aligned properly on each marketing piece. This is about image, and cohesion. For instance, does a color palette blend with a font? How about photography, white space, and ad copy? If you don't have time for branding, you get lazy and you'll say "Looks good."
3. You don't understand graphic design. If you're not a graphic designer, but yet you've tried to do your own graphic design, you understand how much time it takes to design any marketing piece. And then your marketing piece that you designed didn't turn out that great. By hiring a marketing firm that has a graphic designer, it is one less thing on your to do list and the graphic design will turn out 200 times better!
4. You're not capable of building systems around people. This could mean in an office, or virtually - but those systems need to enable people to get their jobs done efficiently. You can't have systems that result in projects that tend to limp across the marketing finish line.
5. Your new motto is: "I can sleep when I'm dead." When 12-hour days sound like an easy week, there’s something awry. Part of the whole point of hiring a marketing firm is to save you time, which allows you to focus more on your business and not spending all of your time in the office.
6. You ask your high schooler to blog for you. Blogging is very important for potential customers to find you. A typical blog should consist of 600 words and usually takes two hours to type up. Another source of content for your website would be an eBook, which also can take up part of your day.
7. You're not closing leads. Sales leads should be given prime attention the second they're ready to be contacted by a sales representative (or yourself). If you're getting distracted from closing new business to attend to marketing matters, it might be worth outsourcing specific marketing functions to a marketing firm.
8. You've become a jack of all trades, master of none. The more of the tasks that you take on, the more your time and talents get stretched thinner and thinner. Be great at what you do, running a business! And let the marketing be done by people who are great at it.
9. You only posted once on Facebook last month. Wait, Facebook only?! Did you forget about LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter? Businesses should be posting to all of these social media platforms AT LEAST once a day. Yes this takes a lot of time, but it needs to be done to get your message out there. Social media marketing can be hard to wrap your head around but the main goal is to promote your business and your products or services. Social media is almost like your website, it can be accessed 24/7.
10. You're not generating leads. You have a website that works for you 24/7 (hopefully more than you work) but you're not gaining inbound leads from it. A marketing firm can help with your SEO to drive traffic to your website and then help capture those visitors and turn them into leads!
What do all these signs come down to? Growth and sales suffer when you’re doing too much, whether inside or outside your skill set. Leads are likely falling through the cracks and into your competitors’ arms. If more of the experiences in this blog were familiar to you, dip your toes into looking for a marketing firm. You might find that it will help you shorten your grunt list, letting you spend time on the things you do best that help you grow the business.
Blue Frog Marketing in Des Moines can help your business LEAP ahead of your competition. Click on the button below to learn more.