Full Time Marketers vs. Pick-n-Choose

Making the decision to hire a marketing professional for your business means that you’ve arrived that the point where you need more than you can do yourself. That’s a great place to be!

What’s not so great is the bewildering variety of experts out there who are trying to sell you on their area of expertise, whether that’s social media marketing, programmatic advertising, SEO, or content marketing. The thing is that all of these things are aspects of a marketing campaign, they are not standalones. You might not need someone putting in 40 hours a week in house, but you do need something more than a scattershot approach to get results and obtain better results over time.

Think of marketing as a tripod and it helps you to see how the three legs support the product.

• Digital Marketing: Email marketing – it’s not dead and do not listen to anyone who tries to claim it is. Digital ad design and deployment. Website construction. App creation. Social media marketing. Content marketing and blogging. SEO. Digital branding.
• Legacy Marketing: Print, television, direct mail, and telephone marketing. Includes on-site events, trade shows, promotions, and in-person sales calls.
• Market Research and Analytics: Consumer and marketplace research. Business intelligence including looking at what your competition is doing. Business planning and development. Data analysis.

With so much under the marketing umbrella, you can see that there’s a lot out there for a Director of Marketing to do, even with a support staff. When you’re looking for a company or a person to handle your marketing, this is what you are actually looking for. You could hire a person here and there to handle bits and pieces of it, but at best you’d be getting involved in a big game of Telephone. Your Facebook page person needs to coordinate with your advertising person who needs to coordinate with your web designer who needs to coordinate with your app builder who needs to work with your email marketer… you see where this is going, right?

32! 25! 17! BLOG!

Campaigns need coordination in order to work. Think of a football team. You can’t stick a bunch of guys on a football field, hand them a ball, and say, “Okay. Take this ball, run it over there, and these guys are going to try and stop you.” You’re not going to have a football game, you’re going to have a free-for-all and the team without strategy or organization – much less a coach and quarterback – is going to be hamburger. Your marketing professional designs the plays, their team executes them.

So, you can see that marketing is not simple, nor are there just one or two things that you have to do in order to have a successful launch or campaign. When you hire a professional marketer, you’re getting the coach and the players, and a playbook. No, it’s not cheap. It’s not a budget buster, but it can be a bottom-line maker. In this case, you get what you pay for – time, expertise, and experience – to get the results your business needs to thrive and grow.

About 4 Step Studio

4 Step Studio is an online marketing agency that specializes in website design and redesign, SEO, social media and more. Our team of experts focuses on helping small business get found online, while educating them on what will make them successful in the digital world. To learn more about what we can do for you, visit our website at www.4StepStudio.com