Every industry has its own secrets and let's be honest with you, I'm trying to run a business here too. But what I'm trying to say is we can both win from this arrangement. So hear me out.
First, let me lay this out straight.
If you have all the time in the world, then do it yourself (DIY).
If you have all the money in the world or you run a profitable business with more than 50 employees, then you're also looking at the wrong article.
But if you are a busy small business owner with a limited marketing budget, then read on.
ONLY CONTINUE READING IF YOU THINK THIS IS FOR YOU.
When hiring a digital marketer, the following will help you assess whether the presented “solution” is suitable or not.
(And hopefully lead you to choose us as your best choice!)
Before I started my business, I went through numerous training on how to build and run a successful marketing agency. These training were delivered by guru marketers who have earned 7 and 8 figures. And their key principle is this:
“Sell a full package of marketing services at premium pricing to clients who can afford it.”
The definition of “full package” includes all the common marketing services such as search engine optimisation (SEO), content marketing, and paid advertising.
The reason for charging premium pricing is simple, the guru marketers have found that the student marketers can earn more money by taking on less clients.
This works in theory when the clients receive more value than the money they spent on the marketers.
I know many digital marketers have followed this principle and made a lot of money. But often their results were achieved at the expense of the businesses they failed to serve (ie, small business owners like you).
Further, marketing efforts are not always successful and results are not always guaranteed to repeat unlike a mathematical formula.
For example, sometimes your marketing activities will turn out to be ‘1 + 1 = 0’ while other times it can be ‘1 + 1 = 11’.
As such, “selling a full package of marketing services at premium pricing to clients who can afford it” is a formula that is proven to benefit the marketer, but not necessarily with the best interest in mind for clients.
This creates an imbalanced value proposition that hurts unaware business owners and leaves a bad rep for marketers.
I have been to enough business networking meetings to hear stories after stories of business owners who have been “burned” because they felt that they overpaid for marketing services that didn’t get them the expected results.
As a marketer myself, I feel responsible to correct this misfortune through my own business.
Moving forward.
Let’s clear the smoke here and explore an alternative where both business owners and marketers can win together — a win-win scenario.
For starters, you don’t need a “full package" of marketing services and you don't need to try to do everything at once.
Instead you need to understand how each of your marketing pieces work for you and then decide on where to start first.
At the same time, you should always be thinking at the back of your mind:
"Is this spending/investment a worthwhile one? And is this giving you the expected level of return that you want on your investment?"
You also need clarity on your business/brand values so all your marketing activities speak the same message. But it doesn’t mean you need to market your business on every social media platform and try to do them all at once, which is what a “full package” promotes.
This may work for a large corporation because they have more resources, but this approach doesn’t necessarily work for small businesses that need sales and results fast.
So, strategically using your limited marketing budget and time is crucial.
Further, you don’t need to be everywhere or do everything in order to have a successful marketing outcome. But you do need to be present and active where your prospective customers are.
From our experience, your prospective customers may use multiple social platforms, but there are usually one or two they are most active on. Focus on these. If you are unsure, the easiest and most effective way is to actually go and ask your existing customers.
In our view, this is what you should do: Start marketing on one social media platform, two at most, and focus.
This is because we have seen time and time again that results (and less waste of effort) will come from your most focused and consistent activities.
Of course, then, at some point in time in the future, your business is blooming, and you will want to further expand your marketing outreach and maximise your online presence so that your prospective customers can easily find you on whichever platform they use.
However, the key here is “at some point in time in the future”, it is not about doing everything at the same time.
So let's recap the problem here: when a small business tries to copy a big corporation’s “do everything” approach, it is very RISKY.
This approach is a trap for failure because not only does it require a large amount to set up but it also requires an expensive monthly upkeep fee as you are trying to do marketing with both breadth and depth.
For small businesses, they usually can’t afford to spend thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars per month for more than 3 to 4 months (the time required to see results) without the guarantee that this will generate profitable sales in the end.
In other words, they could potentially use up most of their marketing budget before actually seeing consistent results. And because they have already spent a significant amount of money on this marketing marathon, they are left with little to nothing to continue promoting their business if the first marketing campaign fails.
Small businesses cannot afford to take on these risks, and hope that on the off-chance that this all-or-nothing marketing campaign yields positive results.
For small businesses, one such mistake is crippling. So you need to play smart.
So how do you actually minimise the risk and maximise the money invested into your marketing?
Just to be clear, spending lots of money on marketing isn’t actually the problem here.
The success or failure of your marketing depends on WHERE you spend the money.
In the above section, we have established what the risk is. But to avoid it, you must understand the difference between spending money on TESTING and on SCALING your marketing efforts.
What you want to do is to spend the minimum amount of money on focused testing to find out where you should spend the maximum amount of money to scale on what works.
This means you can manage the risk by spending money on marketing efforts that you know will work.
However, most of the time businesses would overspend on testing and not invest enough on scaling.
For example, a business has a yearly marketing budget of $15K and they spent $4-5K in the first 3-4 months on hiring a marketer plus advertising costs.
If they don't get a break even ROI (return on investment) at the end of the 3-4 months, they won’t be able to keep up the same marketing activities. Which means there's an even lower chance of getting a positive ROI from the initial investment.
And what’s worse is that they have already spent most of their marketing dollars in the first quarter leaving little to no money to keep marketing for the rest 8-9 months.
In this situation, many would come to the erroneous conclusion that “marketing doesn’t work”. But in reality the business has overspent on testing but leaving little to no money on investing in what works.
Marketing is a long game. You can’t just dip your toes and hope that you will get great results.
To achieve success, you need to do what Thomas Edison did (a lot of testing), learn from your feedback (aka failure) and keep testing until you find a marketing activity that works consistently for you.
I know all these may sound a bit overwhelming, so let’s summarise the key points here.
At Happy Customers Consulting, we built our business around the modular marketing service approach rather than a “full package” solution so our clients can focus their money on testing and finding out what works.
This also allows our clients to scale their marketing activities more effectively but investing only on what works.
We use paid advertising as the primary marketing channel to optimise our clients’ budgets for best results. This gives our clients more control over their market testing and easily upscale successful results.
We help individuals and small teams to enhance their existing marketing activities. Our goal is to help you achieve ROI positive as soon as possible so you can focus more money on what works.
Read our article on the shortcut to put you in front of thousands of prospective customers if you wish to learn more about how it works.
Below is our 4-steps success formula that we use in our own marketing, and also for our clients to get the best results.
Now you know the secrets on how to achieve successful marketing outcomes and things to consider when hiring the right digital marketer for you; you are ready to put these knowledge into action. Nothing delights me more than seeing others succeed.
If this article makes sense to you and you are looking for a marketer to help,
Below are some testimonials from our customers.
"I highly recommend Wells if you want someone who genuinely cares about you and your business and someone who is determined to get you results."
— Julia Zielke | Sales Inside Edge
"The hardest thing when looking for a good marketer is finding one that is not just good technically but also understands the nuances of messaging. Someone who understands the needs and wants of the target audience. Create a coherent plan. Execute. Measure. Recalibrate where necessary.
After all, anyone can learn to press buttons on Facebook and get some level of success. But what happens when Facebook changes the rules (happens all the time), or there's a new trend, or your ad has burned out from getting in front of the same people over and over again. I wanted to make sure that I worked with someone who would be able to pivot where necessary. And quickly at that. And that's why I chose to work with Wells. Not just to do my marketing, but also to do it for my own clients.
So do yourself and your business a favour and hire him and simply watch the results."
— Cliff Coelho | Storydriven.video
"Thank you Wells, for being such a valuable asset for Subeez and our clients. You are truly a legend."
— Nicki Ritchie | Subeez
Happy Customers Consulting
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