Last updated: August 06, 2020
In this guide, you'll learn what's best, hire a marketing company, agency, an in-house marketer, or option #3 (which we'll discuss later), which nearly guarantees your marketing and sales efforts will be useful.
Marketing is confused with branding.
Some people think it's branding, some think it's sales, some think it's scammy, and that it should be beautiful.
Nope.
More...
The True Purpose Of Marketing
The purpose of marketing, precisely what I call Growth Marketing, is to take your prospective customer and guide them to connect with your product or business.
Then to turn them into a paying customer and to bring them coming back to your business to buy more.
Marketing's most crucial function of your business, more important than your product, is more critical than your operations, more critical than your engineers. If you don't get a customer, how are you going to function?
Coaches, consultants, and entrepreneurs running 6, 7, & 8 figure businesses understand their customers.
They get them to buy, and marketing is an essential part of planning in their businesses and not an afterthought (like most companies).
Depending on your business type, 90-100% of your growth marketing can and NEEDS to be automated.
Your focus is on managing and growing your business and not on hoping a customer comes in the door.
Who Has Your Best Interest in Mind When It Comes to Your Business?
Is it that Marketing Company or Agency that you might hire to help you plan a strategy and implement it in the way they know?
Would it be that in-house marketer you want to hire or currently work for your team doing your social media and putting up your website?
Or would it be that in-house marketer who manages the marketing agency or company for your company?
It's you. You have your business's best interest in mind because it's your company, it's your project, it's your passion, and your livelihood is at stake.
Whether you deal with a marketing agency or company or an in-house marketer, you need to understand effective growth marketing processes to lead your in-house team or agency to accomplish the results you want.
How To Treat Marketing Companies / Agencies
I would treat the marketing agency, company, or in-house marketing team like you would treat a real estate agent/broker or a stockbroker, you want them to perform the action you request of them and not necessarily rely on their advice.
Most people have their own biases. Individual personal goals, like a marketing agency's goal, is not necessarily for your business to thrive.
It's for them to charge you much money for as long as they can to pay their payrolls and make a profit.
Your in-house marketers have similar goals, to keep their jobs and make money so they can live their lives.
If you have a fantastic culture, you attract the people who want to make a difference, and your company's goals are life-changing.
Let's jump into the pros and cons of each type of marketing and why option #3 is the best place to start or the best place to focus on in your business.
Option #1: Marketing Company / Agency
These are the marketing companies that rarely specialize in a kind of marketing. They say they are good at search engine optimization (SEO), website design and development, social media marketing, pay per click (PPC), video production, content writing, reputation management, conversion optimization, email marketing, and others
Pros
Cons
Conclusion:
Having worked in marketing companies and agencies and seen how they run from the inside, you should often stay away unless you know what you're doing and what you want them to accomplish.
They can only help you as far as you understand your marketing and how you're going to convert customers and fulfill your product.
How To Select A Marketing Agency or Company
Now, I want to make sure that if you're going to select a company, you check for the following:
Ask them to show you proof of the results they are claiming about their previous clients. Sometimes with an NDA, they can't show you everything but they can show you something.
Ask them for specific results, not just that their branding efforts had 10,000 impressions, how did that branding efforts do in terms of increasing sales. They'll usually say branding can't be tracked and at this point, you want to work with someone focused on getting you revenue, not brand exposure.
If they worked with a business similar to yours, ask them the cost to acquire the customer and how much revenue was generated and ask for proof. If they talk about only getting you leads, you probably shouldn't work with them because paying customers is all that matters, you can get 10,000,000 leads with 0 customers.
Ask for references to their current and previous clients, at least 2 of each and call them.
Know what you want from an agency and focus on a specialized agency. If you want a website, speak to marketing firms who create amazing websites that make sales. If you have a product conversion process that works, get an ad agency focused on Facebook or Google Ads to amplify your efforts. If you want effective sales copy written for your ads and emails, higher a specialized copywriter or agency.
Read the contract they make you sign, and do not lock yourself in for a year, go month to month and ensure there are no cancellation fees
This is not an exhaustive list of things to ask or do when trying to select a Marketing Agency or Company but it will help and you'll disqualify a lot of people.
Only Work With Agencies If You Know What You're Doing
Treat marketing companies and agencies as a broker, and you want them to do the work that you assign and understand yourself.
Agencies don't have your best interest in mind, and their goals often conflict with yours.
Option #2: In-House Marketer / Team
In this route, you likely start by hiring a generalist who understands copy, advertising, email marketing, website conversions, SEO, and other marketing channels. You'll then probably hire a Marketing Director and hire more specialists as the results this team produces are apparent.
Pros
Cons
Conclusion:
Having worked alongside a lot of new/experienced marketers, even those with prestigious MBAs, they usually don't know what they are doing and much of the time need someone to tell them what to do.
Some marketers who too specialized in one thing and a business does not succeed on social only, ads only, a website only, you need a complete system.
Many of these marketers have never run a business and they can spend a lot of money getting tools that costs thousands of dollars a month that produce a couple hundred dollars per month in results.
How To Select Your First Marketer
Again, I want to make sure you're at least equipped to get the right first marketer if you really want to hire one and you understand what you're doing:
You want someone experienced in setting up marketing systems, people who can automate a lot of your marketing.
They have run their own business and have worked for other people before, and probably working for someone right now (unless their goal is to make a transition).
They like a challenge and they are self-managed.
Hopefully you already have a working conversion system to convert customers, you want this person to amplify current efforts and to develop new channels to bring people in.
You want someone who can demonstrate results, who can understand your business and customers better than you can.
You want someone who can write copy, sales copy, not content copy that speaks directly to your customers.
You want someone focused on Growth Marketing, this is measurable direct results, if a $1 is invested, they can track that it generates $2.
They need to understand some html, css, javascript to be able to set up tracking for your website.
This marketer also need to understand whatever website solution you are using (I recommend wordpress as a content management system) so that they can deploy pages, help you rank for SEO and more
Also, even though I said they should understand sales copy, they need to also be at heart a content marketer who can develop articles that your customers are looking for.
You do not want a marketer who doesn't share their knowledge, you want what they do to be documented and repeatable (don't get held hostage!).
Phew, that's a lot of stuff you're looking for. Depending on where you hire this first marketer it can cost you between $65,000 to $125,000 a year for the right person.
But if you find the right person, they can generate 20x or more their cost $1,300,000 to $2,500,000, and even more in revenue and profit because they set your system up right.
Only hire a marketer if you understand exactly what you need them to accomplish
Who you hire is only as good as you in terms of you articulating and getting your sales process setup to work consistently.
You can hire Star Marketers (think Michael Jordan of Marketing), but these people are usually already working and growing a business massively and not looking for a low paying job.
You need the skills and need to understand marketing and growth yourself to truly create an affective in-house marketing team.
Option #3: Set Up Your Own Predictable Growth Marketing Machine
Now, option #3 I think is the best to start with because whether you choose to hire a marketing agency, company or in-house marketer, #3 will actually amplify the results these other people can give you.
If you choose option #3, you might actually be your in-house marketing director and grow your company 6 figures, 7 figures, to 8 figures and beyond.
Many times, people choose route #3 and hand it off to the right people to scale it even better.
A majority of folks I've coached, consulted and worked with think of marketing as an afterthought.
Build It And They Will Come!
They set up a business and no one buys.
They don't know why.
If I set up shop, shouldn't people automatically come to my door and buy?
Nope.
You have to build a growth accelerator system like this:
This system is predictable and allows you to augment it with what is working and make changes as you find things working better or worse.
As mentioned before, you can automate 90-100% of this process, and if you build it yourself, you'll see better results compared to relying on someone else to build it.
Get a Detailed Breakdown of the Growth Accelerator System
See how this system has worked for 6 different companies in very different niches, from coaching, consulting, software, education, parenting, and a local business
The 4 Parts of the Growth Accelerator System
The 4 Parts of the Growth Accelerator system are:
You don't need to be a marketing or growth expert to set up this system and generally if you were an expert, you'd probably overthink it and not put it together in the first place.
Component #1: Targeted Traffic
The most important step in marketing is putting your product / business in front of the right people.
You can have a mediocre product, and mediocre conversion system, and great targeted traffic and still make good sales.
You need traffic from all sources, organic, paid, social, video, referral, etc.
Component #2: Conversion System
Now, if you have the right message, with the right product, and great targeted traffic, you can have great sales.
You need a system and process through multiple channels to convert people into customers.
That fresh new prospect, depending on where they start in your conversion process will specifically timed emails if they give their email, with specifically timed ads based on the actions they've taken, to keep moving them through the conversion process.
It's not very hard to put together, it just requires a little bit of thinking and some of the available templates we created at Growthy.com.
Component #3: Experiments & Feedback
This step if often overlooked, when you set up your growth accelerator system, you actually need to test things, test offers, test headlines, test emails, test advertising channels, and it's very easy to test these things with the right tools.
When you know the two most important metrics in your business, you can run experiments all day long or hand them off to a conversion optimization expert.
Component #4: Implement Changes
The last and important step is to implement the changes 100% from your experiments and feedback.
And it feeds right back into your traffic because your traffic will see your changes and you'll gather more results in your conversion system to keep improving your system.
This allows you to scale, to start spending 4 figures per month, to 5, to 6 and even to 7 figures per month on acquiring customers predictably.
YOU WANT TO BE IN CONTROL OF YOUR OWN DESTINY
When you understand and are able to implement simple yet powerful growth marketing processes into your business, you and lead the right people to help you scale the process.
It all starts with you though, take control of your destiny and build your own Predictable Growth Marketing Machine
6 Case Studies of the Predictable Growth Marketing Machines
To be in true control of your destiny, you must watch this presentation and see how 6 companies were able to implement this predictable down to the dollar growth marketing machine into their businesses