Human nature causes most of us to bristle at the mention of just about any dollar figure that’s $500 or greater. However, sometimes it’s helpful to gain perspective when asking ourselves, “What’s the alternative?” There are many reasons to consider outside help for digital marketing, and below is a list of some of the main reasons to not only consider outside help, but start gaining enhanced results by getting that outside help today.
Cheaper Than Hiring Full-Time / Part-Time Employee(s)
Anyone with inside help – aka: full-time or part-time staff – knows it’s a significant chunk of the overhead. Of course, no one hires inside help with the idea they’re going to spend more than they should to enhance their operations; the whole point is to grow – not just in size, but scale profits with the size.
Suppose a company was contemplating the external vs. internal decision with their digital marketing. Taking a $1,000 per month contract as our standard for outside help – a fair price in the digital marketing realm (not the lowest, nor the highest price-point) – things become clear almost immediately. Not many people I know whom I’d let within a football field of my company’s marketing budget would work for $12,000 a year. Frankly, of those I wouldn’t let within two football fields of my company’s marketing budget, I’m guessing zero would work for $12,000 a year.
The experienced business owners and entrepreneurs are more-than-likely thinking this: “That’s a single contract for the digital marketing company; they aren’t relying on one client.” Touché. However, from the perspective of a company that’s even thinking about digital marketing, the reality they’re faced with hasn’t changed. The decision of the company facing the external vs. internal decision has to determine how they’ll get their message out, and that message is either getting handled by a specialized team that eats, sleeps, and breathes this world (external) – or, it’s getting handled by the guy(s) or girl(s) down the hall who’re working for far more than a total of $12,000 per year / $1,000 per month.
More Time to Do What You Really Do
Suppose a company isn’t considering hiring internal employees to do their marketing, but is aware the Internet isn’t going anywhere, and wants to begin making it work for them rather than against them. The choice now becomes this: “Either I / we do the digital marketing, or we hire an outside team to do it.”
There are certain things in life that don’t change. The physics people will argue with this, but one of those things is time. There’s probably a crazy place – similar to the movie Interstellar – where one hour is the equivalent to 20 Earth years, but that only makes our point more urgent! Back to a more serious note, time on our planet is constant, and I know how much something insanely trivial like a GoDaddy password change can eat time like the water planet with giant waves in Interstellar where every hour is 20 years.
Whether one is destroying their valuable time figuring out passwords – and trust me, the digital marketing world won’t create less passwords for your operating pleasure – or simply experimenting with marketing strategies that aren’t free and don’t work (a waste of time where I come from) – this feeling of wasting time will throw everything else off. By “everything else” I’m talking about not only one’s agenda for the day/week/month/quarter, but their mindset while doing it. Few things will set me into a worse mood than looking at the clock to see 12:30 PM and realize I’m where I thought I’d be by 9:15 AM, and the only reason I lost that time was because I was lost in a password hell, a trouble-shooting black-hole, or a software learning curve. Some of these things are part of life, but other things don’t have to be, and one of them is taking on the swallowing-of-a-watermelon known as taking on your digital marketing by yourself.
More Effective Marketing – aka: Better Results
Since we’re apparently going forward with hypothetical situations, let’s now assume we’re dealing with a company that has decided this: “Thank you GoEdison, I read your dorky blog with Interstellar references, which cost me three hours of time because I also watched the movie as a result, but – no thanks – I’m going to do it on my own.”
We’ve ran into these companies, and some of them are now clients. The response is always something like this: “We wish we would’ve moved forward with you sooner; it was a time warp [as illustrated above], and we didn’t get any results – not to mention money spent ineffectively / less effectively compared to the per dollar value we achieved with GoEdison.”
Another response we get from companies who’ve tried doing it on their own, and are less receptive afterward is this: “We’ve tried digital marketing before, and it didn’t make a difference; it was a waste of time, and it created more work.”
Regarding the second response, this makes our point: leave the digital marketing to those who know what they’re doing. I don’t like the quote I get when I get quoted on fixing the broken belt on my car or getting new brakes, but I also don’t want to be stranded in Compton because I decided to “do it myself” – not to mention the more expensive new engine from doing it wrong and/or the less-than-friendly locals who found me before Uber did. This wonderful world of commerce has given us the ability to save time, save money, save hair, and – more importantly – attain results through the help of our fellow small businesses whom we like to call partners.
External vs. Internal
In the end, we want to save companies the pain we’ve seen far too often through our many years of experience. The two responses above lead to the same place for companies we want to help who’ve either tried or are about to try doing it on their own: wasted time, wasted budgets, wasted energy, and disappointment / discouragement. To me, the disappointment / discouragement is the worst tragedy in the above list because a negative mindset can derail everything that is part of the company’s core operations. Who knows if the next great revolutionizing idea was around the corner? Instead, the team decided to do their digital marketing on their own, then – while trying to figure out Google Analytics – Bob from accounting threw a haymaker at John from IT (again, a hypothetical situation). Now, the company culture has fallen apart, and they’re hiring lawyers, whom cost even more money and bring processes to a halt.
Even if a company does find a way to do their own digital marketing, I bet a million hypothetical dollars that same company spent more money to do it, spent a lot more time to do it, and achieved far worse results. The results are where the rubber hits the road. The internal results will pale in comparison to those given to an outside small business like GoEdison – letting us do the digital marketing – while the business stays locked into what they really do. We’ll all land running, keeping the ball moving down the field in the right direction.
Give us a call! We’ll bring you coffee, have a conversation, make you laugh like you hopefully did while reading this blog, and – more importantly – we’ll begin making your life easier while delivering enhanced results!