January 2019

Ultimately, even as a small business, you want your marketing to be set up to work well in house.

There are good reasons on many occasions to hire external consultant/agencies/experts, as they work across diverse businesses/brands, they often see things that a mostly inward looking team is likely to miss. But longer term, the key people you depend on may move away, go somewhere else.

Also, the costs are bound to be higher externally .

Learn from the external expects/consultants/agencies, then bring some or most of those capabilities in house. You need to be tenacious and focused on ensuring you can develop capabilities in house.

Does that mean you will be able to do everything in house? Probably not.

Five things to do about it! There are more.
But here are some things that you can gradually shift in house from a digital marketing perspective:

i) Content creation, some of your small business team may be able to create a significant amount of your content production. Bear in mind that for an external consultant, they need to become close to your business before they can add value – that takes time and money. If some of your own people internally can achieve this, why rely wholly on external support.

ii) Video production can go part in house. These days it doesn’t take much in terms of equipment expenditure to create video content. With a bit of training, some of your internal resources can be creating your video in house

iii) Production of ads, visual, graphics. This is often an external cost, and a half way measure are the many platforms that allow you to save a lot of money by directly reaching out to creative talent. A way to bring some of this in house is to skill up your internal people to become more confident in terms of directly reaching out and interacting with the artists. This saves you in relying on more expensive organisations that often have layers of management that sit above the artists and usually are far more costly.

iv) Strategy sessions ought to be handled at least partially in house. Who knows the business best other than you and your people? This may take some guidance, but developing your marketing plans and strategy ought to be longer term driving internally rather than externally.

v) Specific tactical skills can be either partially in house or work directly with talented individuals (who cost a fraction of what larger agencies cost). There used to be a time that agencies were one stop shops for all your creative needs, and then they split into different areas such as promotions, direct, advertising, and then digital came along, and now they are still touting themselves as being able to do everything. But if you are paying one agency for everything, you are most likely not attracting the best talent, but a mixture of acceptable talent with a good management team that work hard to extract money out of you to feed their agency.

One of the key skills to developing capabilities in house deals with effective ongoing training. Train your people internally to have the ability and understanding on how to acquire the implementation talent. This avoids going through swathes of management teams who essentially get to decide what’s best for you.

Skills such as: talent hunting; accessing modern tech platforms where different types of talent offer their services directly; and building up your own bespoke in house team once you know what you want, are all great skills to nurture in house

First of all, digital marketing isn’t easy for any size of business.  There is a lot of waffle going on in digital marketing these days, with large brands that have huge budgets often getting it wrong.

Take a leaf out of Gary Vaynerchuck’s book (or books as it happens). The main thing in digital marketing according to Gary is ‘content’ and 99% of content is bad that companies are putting up. So, even if Gary is half right, many businesses are failing dismally with their content. Gary is openly acknowledged as one of the top digital experts in the US.

Then there’s this preoccupation with programmatic advertising. You may have heard of it. Companies have been spending billions on it, and quite a few smart people in digital are saying its mainly a waste of time.

Then there’s search, paid and organic. Companies are spending a fortune on search and it’s getting harder for them to rig the results in their favour.

Then there’s mobile marketing, and guess what, very few companies are any good at it.
So if you’re a small business with a limited marketing resource, what are your chances?

Well, they’re probably a lot better than many of the larger companies who are so set in their ways that they are doing a great job in producing at best mediocre digital marketing.

Then there are agencies. Well, agencies are facing an uphill challenge keeping their clients happy, as many of them are operating as if they are doing digital marketing ten years ago. Guess what, if you are doing digital marketing that looks a year or two old, you are behind the times, so guess how bad you must be if your digital marketing is over ten years old.

Now I’m not saying that most agencies are bad at digital marketing, nor am I saying that most companies no matter how large are bad at it, but the reality is that it’s difficult to do well, and that’s for those with deep pockets who still manage to make as many mistakes as possible.

If you are looking at doing smarter digital marketing and you are limited in your budgets and time, you may have an advantage. You can cut through the bull and focus on what really works for you. The best advice is to work out what your customers want, where they are and how to really engage to them. Most importantly, stop selling to them, start engaging, and be interesting!