When is it smarter to hire an outside marketing team?

The most important thing is to track where your business is coming from. That means training your staff to ask any new patient or client on how they found about your business or organization.  Then you need to write it down and tally it up each month so you know where your business is coming from. This is very critical for every business or organization, it takes time and effort but it needs to be don. 

It's getting easier and easier to track the ROI of online marketing. What's important is working with a marketer to create realistic goals and KPI's. Then having meetings at regular intervals to discuss how things are going and how to improve. 

Sometimes good KPI's are hard to develop. It's difficult to see how clicks and likes and hearts turn into conversions and profit. A good marketer will be able to see the bigger picture, focus in on what matters, and effectively communicate this to you.

A KPI for my website could be visitors, but that doesn't necessarily turn into sales. What matters is the quality of that traffic. I need to ask myself where to cultivate good traffic and deploy my KPI's there. 

Good marketing should be just as much about learning as it is implementing. You need to be looking at the incoming data and asking what it tells you about your clients and what you could be doing differently to reach more of them. The world is moving too fast for any marketer to assume they know it all, or that they fully understand your clients. 

I think you, as a business owner, have a responsibility to try and learn a little bit about everything the marketer will be doing so you can ask the right questions. Marketing isn't a set-em-up and watch them go industry. Whether or not you outsource you should be taking the time to integrate your marketing with the rest of your business so they work together and understand each other. 

So yes, I would outsource my marketing. But I would make sure I have a good working relationship with my marketing team, I'm willing to learn a little bit about what they do, and that I meet with them regularly to discuss and refine goals. 

I hope this helped

It’s quite simple to answer this important and engaging question

Ask yourself the following question and your response should give you the answer to your question “when to hire an outside markeing company for your business”

(A) are you comfortable with your business income? If your answered “NO” it’s time to hire help

(A) do you want more customers? If you answered “YES” it’s time to hire help

(A)  do you want to earn more money? If you answered “YES” it’s time to hire help

(A) do you want to grow your business? If you answered “YES” it’s time to hire help

(A) if you wanted to today, can you financially retire? If you answered “NO” its time to hire help

To me it is simple.  Do not spend any money if you can not predict results with a reasonable amount of certainty.  If you have to guess or hope the results will come after you spend the money, a dangerous gamble.   Research first.  Look at competition and see what they are doing and if it is successful for them, test yourself, adjust based on results and then move forward yourself. 

One consideration as to whether or not to hire an outside vendor is how much would it cost you to hire a highly qualified, full time employee to do your marketing? Salary, benefits, taxes, etc. Chances are if you are a small business you can't afford to hire someone with lots of experience and it's really a waste of money to hire someone on the cheap because you won't get great results. The other way to measure the ROI is the results you get from who you hire. What kind of exposure are you getting? Are you able to translate that into sales? Things like that. The real benefit of hiring a pro is that they can help you decide where you'll get the most bang for your buck and then they can execute the plan efficiently and effectively.

There are alot of great answers here and it's always a great way to get further educated on a topic!  First, yes I agree with hiring others that are either more educated or skilled at tasks that we are not.  Because I'm in this space, I will add an area that I think has been overlooked.  Lets use a quote from one of the contributors here "Marketing generates interest, not sales".  Though the person had great advice, I want to challenge this statement a bit (not as a negative but more as thought provoking).

I would say carefully planned out Digital Loyalty Rewards MARKETING System CAN indeed generate SALES in the form of REPEAT SALES, which can be huge for businesses and often times overlooked (leaving a ton of money on the table).  The old 80/20 principle!  If 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers wouldn't you want those customers to come in more often and spend more money?  What if the same Digital Loyalty Rewards System could also reach out to those other 80% of (inactive customers) and get them to not only come back, visit, and spend money (through a perfectly timed, incentivized & executed text message based on key parameters) and in the process get them reengaged in your Digital Loyalty System so that you can continue to market to them!

Please don't misunderstand me, there is still a need to get more customers through marketing effort and advertising, but if you have no means to keep those customers engaged, then its going to be an endless treadmill of trying to always capture more customers to replace the ones you may not have even realized you lost!

Just a thought...but I've seen it work extremely well over the past 6 1/2 years!

In my opinion your business is best served by hiring an agency that has the capability to handle multiple facets of advertising and marketing to get the best ROI. If you have to hire separate individuals or companies for each task such as display advertising, social media management, email marketing, traffic generation and reviews/reputation management it can become expensive very quickly. Many of our client's have hired in-house marketing people and later ended up hiring us to replace them simply because they found the person they hired was not proficient enough in all facets of marketing and the bottom line was they were not experiencing growth in their customer base, sales and overall customer value.

We save our client's money because we handle all these area's of marketing and more for one low monthly fee.

You will know right away if you are working with a marketer aligned with your goals. They will be able to track every impact they have made. If they can’t, they are not a good fit.

I personally track all of my digital efforts for my clients. It is very evident what traffic is am bringing and the work I am executing. Last bit of advise, work with a marketer who focuses on your industry. That way they can apply past experiences that best benefit you from past situations with minimal loss. 

Thanks! If home services is you industry, I’m your marketer!

Hiring the experts in any given field is a smart choice when wanting to see true results.  We at weblocal understand that ROI is a must for business owners.  The return is different for every business but can be measured and tracked.  Especially when we are utilizing online marketing the ways to track are sometimes in real time.  Marketing is not a cost to a business it is an investment.

I'm a digital marketer so I do have a built-in bias in answering this question.  With that said, my short answer is a good hire, in-house or outsourced, adds value to your business.

I'd say marketing is like learning Excel.  If all you need is a simple model to track, say, your book club budget, then you do not need an expert.  If you are going to do some advanced analytics, linking to a data feed, automating needed calculations routinely with several macros to help you make better decisions, figure on hiring an expert.  

Two decades ago, the Internet was marveling at Mozilla.  Since then, Google and Amazon have grown to be among the most valuable companies in the world.  Today, Facebook has over 2 billion members and there are over 1 billion daily views of Youtube educational videos.  80% (eighty!) of all purchases begin with an Internet search.  

The ways in which consumers evaluate suppliers has gone beyond word of mouth.  What are you doing to be visible in this digital age?  The field is so fast-moving that many marketers choose to focus on limited areas to become really expert and partner with other professionals to deliver world class solutions to their clients.

Need someone to provide more B2B leads via LinkedIn?  There's a pro for that.  Need someone to get you above the fold organically for a Google search?  Well, its probably a different pro for that.  

One thing to remember is even if you outsource your marketing, it is still your business.  Be clear on your goals, ask a lot of questions, impart specific details of your business, and require that your marketer is a trusted adviser who teaches you strategically how to convey your value proposition to your target audience.  

The same is true of hiring a marketer in house.  You'd still do performance reviews and strategy discussions, no?  You wouldn't just give them a key to an office and just say "check back in with me next month".  So have those conversations where there is truly communication and dialogue.