As a small business owner / manager, you know the value of a dollar. With so many competing demands on your resources, being careful with your time and money is critical. When it comes to discretionary spending on areas such as marketing, technology, or financial advice, you can easily tempted to go it alone, or contract-out based on the lowest possible price (often to friends or family). In this post, we’ll show you why this is can be a mistake, and one that be much more expensive in the long run.
Let’s say you wanted to build up your online presence. You have done some homework, and decide you want to invest in 3 things: an updated website that is optimized for search engines like Google, a social media strategy, and an email marketing campaign. You have a good idea what you want to achieve, but are not sure how to make it happen.
There are 3 options you could consider:
1. Hire someone on a part-time basis to join your company as a junior marketing manager
2. Contract the work to a full-service ‘interactive’ marketing agency
3. Engage Tiny Briefcase under our Brand Broadcast package
Let’s look the pros and cons of each one:
1. Hire Someone to Join Your Company Part-Time
A part-time marketing role at a small-business salary will likely attract marketing professionals early in their career or just out of school looking for experience.
Pros: You’ll be in close contact with them on a daily basis, and be able to shape their work to get the desired results. They will be eager to show you what they can do.
Cons: They’ll be inexperienced, and may not have the depth of knowledge necessary in the specialized areas of SEO, web design, and managing marketing campaigns. You will also need to spend considerable time educating them on your business and brand. Do you have enough work for them to continue once they are done?
Total Cost: 2 months @ $3,300 / mo., plus a minimum of 15% for taxes and related overhead = $7,590.
2. Contract to a Full-Service Marketing Agency
A good marketing agency with depth in online marketing will easily be able to handle your needs. Agencies usually have experts in all major disciplines such as web design and social media.
Pros: You should get a very high standard of work and expertise.
Cons: In addition to spending the time to find, interview, and hire a firm, you’ll also have to explain your business and your marketing objectives. Firms sometimes assign junior personnel to small files, which can lead to disappointing results. At upwards of $300 an hour, the high level of service won’t be cheap, either.
Total Cost: $10,000 to $25,000, depending on the agency.
3. Use Tiny Briefcase
With Tiny Briefcase, we get to know your business from the start. Our marketing packages are designed to boost your brand through a series of coordinated activities from Day 1.
Pros: We employ experts in all the areas of design, social media, print etc., that deliver high-quality results that capture your brand and company image. By spreading our service over a full year, we can adjust your campaign as your needs change.
Cons: Our packages are designed to deliver incredible value to small and medium sized enterprise. For clients that have sophisticated or elaborate marketing needs, we will match you with a trusted 3rd-party that can manage an intricate campaign on a daily basis.
Total Cost: $2,898 for 12 months of our Brand Builders package [$750 for our initial consultation, plus $179 a month].
“But wait!”, you say, “Can’t I just do this myself? I’ve built web pages before, and Adwords isn’t that hard to figure out.”
To which we say: “By all means, go right ahead!” We would be the last people to discourage clients from educating themselves about the web and social media. First, however, we encourage you to consider the full cost of doing all that work yourself, and how confident you are in achieving the results you want (and deserve!).
Conservatively, to complete the website, build a presence within a social media channel, and launch an email marketing campaign, you will need approximately 50-60 hours of time. If this seems high, consider the time you will need to properly learn the technical tools required, write the creative content required, and manage the process properly. Even with the template-driven tools available for website creation and email marketing, you’ll need to become an expert if your brand is going to be as professional as your business.
And while you are doing all this, you are also running your own business- generating sales, meeting with clients, and performing the work. Creating a website might be a good learning activity, but aren’t those hours better spent developing your customer base? How many customers could you secure if you devoted 50 hours to sales initiatives? 2, 20, 200?
Whatever the number, the value of those customers is likely several times more than what you are saving doing it yourself. That’s dollars in your pocket, with satisfied customers that will translate into even further sales. If we have one message for any client we work with, it is to say this: your time is your company’s most valuable resource. It is also very scarce, and must be focused on the activities that create the greatest value for your business. By using outsourcing services like Tiny Briefcase, you not only gain a trusted advisor who understands your business, you also gain time to spend with your customers.