New Year, New Goals: Building Your Marketing Toolkit
Once you’ve set a specific SMART goals for 2015 and have outlined an activity plan for your goals, it’s time to consider what tools you’ll need and how to maximize them toward reaching your goals.
What tools will you need to achieve your marketing goals?
If you’ve set a good, specific goal, you probably have some idea of what you’re going to do to achieve it. Maybe you’re thinking of expanding into a new social media platform, trying a new form of advertising, or adding a blog to your website, and with a bit of research, you probably have a rough idea of what those things will cost you, financially. Remember, though, that adding tools to your resource kit involves more than just money! What about those less obvious resources: time and energy?
For small business owners and those just getting off the ground, it may seem realistic and cost-effective to manage those things on your own, and in some cases, maybe you can. It’s important, however, to evaluate the return on investment for your own time in the way you would evaluate it for any other employee. If you are spending hours of your time working on your social media presence and seeing very little business coming in through those channels, your ROI might not be as good as it would be if you outsourced that work to someone with specialized experience in creating a social media presence that can attract attention and ignite your spark! A consultation or ongoing plan with one of these specialists can help ensure you aren’t spending more of your time than is justified by your returns.
Remember Lia? When setting up her social media campaign, she was able to recognize that she wasn’t familiar enough with the workings of Facebook’s business tools to get a solid start on her own. She consulted with a social media marketing specialist to help her create a plan and schedule a few posts each month that will appeal to her clientele. Having done so, Lia was able to devote more time to creating creative, original content to share on her page, engage with her community and organically build her audience while having the support of a social media expert.
DIY Versus Hiring Marketing Help
This is is where it is important to evaluate the value of your own time versus finding outside resources to manage some or all of the tasks. A few questions to consider:
If I am going to do the project myself,
- How much time will I be taking to learn and implement it?
- What is my opportunity cost? (What are you giving up in regard to time to do the project yourself – time to work on other areas of your business?)
- Do I have the expertise, patience or resources to do it effectively and produce the best results?
- Can I maintain it on an ongoing basis?
If I am going to find an expert,
- How much time will I gain by hiring an expert?
- What I can I do with the time I gained by hiring an expert? Can I work at building another area of my business, sell more or complete other prioritized tasks?
- How can the expert improve my marketing and brand image?
- Does the expert work with my budget?
- Can the expert demonstrate results and a return on my investment?
- Can the expert help with part of the project then I implement the other portion myself?
- Can the expert maintain it on an ongoing basis?
Not sure if you should do it yourself or hire help? Ask us! We can help determine what is in the best interest in the success of your business and sanity!
Here is the full series:
