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7 Telltale Signs It’s Time to Hire A Marketing Firm

If your expectations aren’t being met, it might be time to outsource. Here are 7 signs it’s time to hire a marketing firm.

You know you need to manage your online marketing. You know your business would benefit from it. Except, like many small business owners, you’re still trying to do it yourself.

Small business owners face a choice: do it in-house or hire a marketing firm. Many business owners come to the same conclusion: that they can’t afford a marketing firm, and if they really need one, they’ll hire one when they’re just a little bit bigger.

But if your expectations aren’t being met, it’s time to bring in the pros. Here are seven telltale signs that you need to hire a marketing firm.

1. You Can’t Really Answer, “What is Marketing?”

You can probably answer the basic question, “What is marketing?” as, “Selling stuff to people.”

Except that answer is reductive, and it’s not actually going to serve your business at all. If anything, your answer is an outdated definition of what marketing is.

If you don’t really understand what marketing is, you definitely don’t know the intricacies of how marketing works, like the difference between SEO and PPC. How can you expect to do marketing well?

2. Your Staff is Over or Underworked

Stop us if this sounds familiar: you have a marketing department, sure, but it’s really an office with three people doing the jobs of at least 10 people.

And because they’re doing the jobs of multiple people, they don’t exactly have a strategy, per se. Unless you count putting out fires as a strategy (hint: you shouldn’t).

Since your tiny marketing team doesn’t have a strategy (or the time to make one) they might be doing marketing, but they’re not doing marketing well.

Alternately, a team with no strategy may not have enough to do. Not because they’re lazy, but because they don’t even know what they should be doing to generate leads.

Both scenarios are actively harmful to your bottom line.

3. You Don’t Have a Professional Content Team

Hand-in-hand with the over- or underworked staff is the lack of a professional content team, whether they’re professional writers or full-time content creators.

You’re probably asking: are professional writers really necessary?

To that, we ask: how embarrassing would it be to send out emails with glaring spelling errors? How many legal bills would you have to pay if someone broke compliance rules because they worded something poorly?

Good writers are worth their weight in gold, and a devoted team of professional writers will always have their hands full writing web copy, drafting new blogs, creating email campaigns, and editing writing for others.

And if you get a good writer who’s also a good content marketer, they know how to write content that will get you ranked better in search results.

4. Your Results are More of a Coin Toss

Speaking of results, how are yours performing?

If the answer is something along the lines of, “50/50 chance of success,” or, “We throw tactics at the wall and see what sticks,” it’s time to reevaluate your strategy.

If your results have been hit or miss, you may have concluded that certain forms of marketing are incompatible with your business.

Here’s the problem: if you don’t have any sort of organized approach, then you don’t have any way of measuring whether a certain tactic is working. So you’re going to wheel back and forth between different ideas without ever giving one a chance to show results.

This is where a marketing agency can help. They know how to craft a campaign and measure its performance, which means they can easily tell whether or not something is working. That’s the difference between a professional and an amateur.

5. You Have an Intern Managing Social Media

If you want to succeed in business, you should strive to have professionals in every aspect of your business. That includes your social media.

So if you have a random employee or unpaid college intern managing your social media, it’s time to hire a marketing firm.

Sure, that random employee or intern might be willing. But they’re going to run your social media the same way they run their personal pages, i.e. without any formal strategy.

Because of this, your social media content will read just like the average person’s page–fragmented, unfocused, and without any clear overall message. Your social media is a marketing tool, which means it needs to be focused in order to work.

6. Day-to-Day Tasks Beat Long-Term Strategy

In case you haven’t caught on yet: you need a formal marketing strategy.

Sure, you can make do without one, but you can’t expect to succeed without one.

Without an overarching goal, your marketing duties become one-off tasks, like scheduling social media posts or sending emails. These tasks make it look like you’re doing the legwork, but it’s almost impossible to turn one-off tasks into a coherent marketing strategy.

A marketing firm can help you turn your attention toward long-term goals so that every individual task is part of the bigger picture. Not only will this clean up your marketing, but it will also make it easier to track your results.

7. You Don’t Actually Like Marketing

Finally, one of the biggest signs you need a marketing firm is that, well, you don’t actually like marketing.

It may not seem like that big of a deal. Everyone has to do things they don’t like, like flossing or paying taxes.

But in marketing, it’s impossible to drum up enthusiasm in your customers if you don’t have any enthusiasm for marketing.

Trust us, it shows. Think mediocre blog posts that don’t say anything, email campaigns that say the same thing every time, brochures that don’t inspire anything but boredom. How can you expect your customers to care about your business if you don’t seem to care?

This is where marketing agencies shine. They’re in marketing because it’s their passion, and they know how to inspire people.

Need to Hire a Marketing Firm?

Does all of this sound suspiciously like your company?

We’ll give you a hint: it’s time to hire a marketing firm. Fortunately, you’ve come to the right place.

We have experienced account managers that will work with you one-on-one to build a strategy that works for your business. We give you the confidence and data you need to conquer your marketing and wow your customers, whatever your goals may be.

Ready to turn over a new leaf in your marketing strategy? Get in touch today.