Why DIY Marketing Will Ruin Your Business?
You’re not going to succeed in business by figuring out how to do query matching to classified entities.
Stop it. Stop trying to figure it all out. Stop using your time to research if you’re supposed to be running display ads or search ads, if your team needs to complete attribution modeling, and if first party cookies is something that should be on your radar.
All this endless research and trial and error steals your time. It’s a distraction from your main purpose and you’re not getting good return on your time investment.
To run a successful business, you need to focus on what made you start your business in the first place. What was that one thing you were so good at that you swept everything else off your desk for? What was it that never felt like work? Do you even remember anymore?
You’re consumed with payroll, inventory management, and monitoring your online reviews. In trying to keep up with best practices on everything from digital advertising to company culture, you’ve lost your spark. You’re thinking fondly about the good old days—that boss, the cozy cubicle, and the thrill of having weekends off.
You’ve become the typical business owner—overwhelmed and working endlessly, but without seeing comparative growth.
Stop DIYing
Most entrepreneurs grew up without the silver spoon. You had to be scrappy and resourceful. The thought of paying someone to run your ads online makes you sick to your stomach.
Are they kidding? 15% of spend to run some ads! Total scam—we have a marketing team, we can do that in-house.
Yes, you can. You can run your online paid advertising in-house at cost after you:
- Spend 2 hours in a meeting with your in-house marketing team feeling out how much each person knows about paid online advertising
- Ask the only person who knows what display ads means to get Google AdWords certified within 30 days
- Pay $1500 for an AdWords training course for your new online ads point person
- After 30 days, meet with your newly certified AdWords team member to review their progress and request a paid search strategy with budget within two weeks
- In two weeks, meet again, and when reviewing the strategy, brainstorm about where else, besides Google, your ads should run. Give your AdWords certified team member one week to refresh the strategy to include multiple platforms
- Hire a temp to do the job of your paid search point person because she is too busy reading blogs and watching videos on how to run ads on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Linkedin
- Meet with your point person to review your newly comprehensive online paid search strategy and try to figure out if you need to include Bing in your budget
- Hand over a $30,000 monthly budget to someone who has never actually run a paid search campaign, tracked conversions, or knows what KPIs to measure results against
- Meet with your point person after campaign has been running for 30 days. Ask about results. Wonder if the results are good or bad
- Hire your temp full time to do the job your point person was hired for
- Since you’re point person just quit, start interviewing candidates who know something about online ads
- Repeat steps above starting with #2
- Wonder how many months of ads your competitor has run and how far behind you are on your new product since you decided to do everything yourself
Richard Branson Knows Best
Not convinced that you’re holding your business back from wild success by doing everything in-house? Take it from an entrepreneur with a net worth of $4.1 billion. Virgin CEO Richard Branson is really good at what he does. And being dyslexic, he’s awful at a lot of things. Don’t ask him to do anything that involves reading or writing. Do ask him for big ideas, brilliant strategies, and forward-thinking concepts.
In a blog post, Richard talks about achieving success by focusing on his strengths.
I used my dyslexia to my advantage and learned to delegate those tasks I wasn’t so good it. This freed me up to look at the bigger picture, and is one of the main reasons I have been able to expand the Virgin brand into so many different areas.
Your Team Aren’t Know-it-Alls
The danger when you have a team working for you is to think the in-house marketing team has everything covered. You have a creative director, art directors, designers, project coordinator, copywriter, and an AV guy, so they should be able to put some brand videos online, right?
You may have hired the best team you could afford, but on a scale of one to ten, your team is a four at capturing your brand through video and getting it properly indexed online. It really takes an integrated team of 13 experts who live and breathe video to make epic brand videos that have the capacity to scale your brand, align with your overall marketing and advertising strategy, and engage with your audience on a whole new level.
You have a great team. They are excellent at so many elements of marketing and advertising—but they aren’t experts at everything. No one is. No team is. Your video guy is great, and everyone loves him, but to make next-level, deeply relatable and connective videos that enhance your overall business and marketing strategy, you really need your AV guy plus an animation artist, sound tech, color tech, and video editor, to name a few.
The other thing to think about is how quickly you can turn around a project when you give it to a team that produces videos all day, every day.
What Are You Missing Out On?
When you’re spending your time in meetings about video sound and color segmentation, mobile optimization, storyscaping, and ad placement channels, how much time are you spending perfecting your product or developing your newest product feature? Isn’t that your thing?
What is your competition doing while you’re fumbling with stuff you and your team aren’t experts at?
Take a step back. Why are you spending half your time doing what you’re not amazing at? Why are you asking your team to be cutting-edge experts at absolutely everything related to marketing and advertising? When you stop clouding your head by trying to do it all, you free your mind to dream about what you can accomplish if you focus on excellence. When you start thinking about the big picture, it suddenly makes sense to hire outside experts to fill the gaps within your team and fuss with that whole video project you had on your business bucket list.
Consider what your business could achieve if you simply spent your work hours doing what you and your team are made for and you outsourced aspects of your business to someone better qualified in that department.
Why You’re Not Outsourcing for Your Weaknesses
Consider a few reasons why business owners hold themselves back through endless learning and DIY projects:
- Time delusion
- Foolish Pride
Getting Over Pride
When you’re trying to do everything yourself or your expecting your in-house team to do everything because it’s cheaper, you’re right. DIY and in-house is cheaper—sometimes.
When you’re DIYing it or going the in-house route, while you aren’t writing a second check to get a video online, that video wasn’t made by a team of experts, and frankly, it’s pretty crappy. And it kinda’ stings that your team of two just spent three weeks on the project.
Don’t fall into the time-delusion trap. Time is money and you are spending real money producing that subpar video. You’re paying two people for three weeks worth of work. What does that add up to?
You suck at stuff. And the team you built isn’t all experts at everything either. No one can do it all. Socrates said, “the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” That old guy is pretty extreme, but you get the idea—wisdom and success is found in knowing that you can’t do it all.
Go Get ‘Em
So, whether it’s just you or it’s you and your dedicated team, make sure your business focuses on excellence. Don’t waste time and headspace by constantly struggling just to achieve middling success. If it’s not your area of expertise, outsource the job to a person or team that are experts in the field. Think big, budget in the experts, and enjoy the return on your investment.
