My yard is a mess.
It’s been that way for going on a year. I’ll occasionally head out on a weekend to mow, trim, work a flowerbed, spread some mulch. Then, the following weekend, it will rain or I’ll have a game to attend for my kids or time to spend with friends.
My landscaping never really gains momentum.
Are you doing the same with your marketing?
Similar to that landscaping, it takes time to build a brand. I call it Brand Velocity. The faster and more consistently you can touch your customers, the quicker they move through the branding stages—awareness, affinity, opinion and finally advocacy. This speed is a function of your bandwidth—the more time you can spend on your marketing efforts, the bigger the return.
On your own, you will make some headway, generate leads, make customers aware of your brand. But then business interferes. Other matters arise. Meetings proliferate. Before you know it, weeks have gone by and the marketing loses momentum. Your marketing can never build the velocity it needs to continually feed your business.
How much momentum has your branding gained? Ask yourself a few questions:
- When your customers hire you, are they hiring because you’re more to them than just a low price?
- Do you know exactly how your customers view your brand and your competitors in the marketplace?
- Do you continually communicate your benefits to customers after a purchase?
- Are your existing customers a source of referrals?
- Are you getting stories placed in the media and online about your business?
- Are you generating a high percentage of your leads through your website?
- Is your trade show participation paying for itself?
- Does every employee understand what your brand stands for?
If you answered no to any of those questions, you may simply need assistance to build your brand’s velocity. More bandwidth, higher velocity, consistent momentum.
Adding to your staff is certainly an option, but there are multiple advantages to outsourcing your marketing staff. These are just a few:
- Focus—Gain planning expertise and additional people with the time to keep all those tactics on task, so you can focus on strategy.
- Fresh perspectives—Get people who know the latest best practices, tactics and consumer motivators.
- Control costs—No additional payroll or benefits costs, no incremental costs for things like office space, computers or supplies or maintaining the latest marketing tracking and analytics technologies.
- Scalable—Pay for more bandwidth for major initiatives and scale back your needs for maintenance periods.
- Access to experience—Even if you don’t contract all the resources of a marketing firm, they all communicate. So you end up with value-added ideas from a larger group of professionals.
The resources to market to ALL your target audiences—including internal groups like employees—for consistency.
For best results, treat your marketing outsourcing as a partnership. Your marketing team should simply be an extension of your internal staff and not regarded as mere contractors. Contractors do not always perceive a long-term stake in the project’s success. You’re hiring just like you would for an employee—make sure the chemistry is good and they have the credentials, then put them to work making you look good.
Once your Brand Velocity picks up momentum, you will return revenues that far exceed any expenses and it will become harder and harder for your competition to slow you down.
I won’t see the same monetary returns from my landscaping project. But once it’s done, I know my house will get noticed. With more impact than I ever could have achieved on my own.
But I’ll still take credit for it.