Red on Marketing Blog

After you resolve to do more effective marketing, there are a few decisions ahead. Among them:

1. Do we need professional help? Or could we do it ourselves?

There are lots of good reasons to self-serve:

• Saves cash
• Keeps all marketing communications efforts centralized
• Builds skills internally
• Leverage free resources available

DIY resources

There are great resources available for DIYs. I recommend just about any MarketingSherpa benchmark report or how-to guide you can get your hands on. Even if it's an old outdated version it could  be an eye opener. Vendors like Google Adwords include campaign set-up and support, so why not take their free advice?

Or, if you already do mailers and telemarketing, you could always increase the volume of each. All that requires is bigger lists and a bit more cash outlay. It could be low-hassle, in the sense that the path to increased exposure is nice and short. No fussing with messaging. No fiddling with design. Just feed more bills in and get more leads out.

Machine out of order?

If that will work, do it. And instead of messing with marketing, do something more fulfilling.

It’s a question only you can answer. You have the 30,000-foot perspective on how you’re doing relative to your business goals.

But as you weigh your decision, let me offer a couple points:

• First, unfortunately, bad marketing is worse than no marketing at all. The reason is that it takes more time and money to repair the damage from a bad impression, than to make a good first impression.

• Second, if you're a b2b company, it's probably not enough to just do more of what you’re used to doing already – if what you’re doing is conventional marketing like advertising, call outs, mailers and Yellow Page ads. I could go on about why; in a nutshell, it's because savvy business decision prevent and resent interruptions. 

Inbound marketing involves helping your target market find you easily when they are searching for help. It includes such tools as search-engine optimization, which is a way of making sure your website contains the same keywords that people are most likely to use when they are looking for your kind of product or service. But it has to be done in a way that impresses both search engines and high-potential prospects. And SEO is only one of many tools used in inbound marketing.

As Laura Ramos, formerly of Forrester Research, wrote in How To Avoid Becoming Obsolete,

“Focusing simply on new campaigns, clever advertising, and delving into social media will only paper over problems. Turning up the heat on conventional marketing activities won't spur the profound changes required.”

Decision point

If you don’t need professional marketing, stop here.

And if you need help shifting to a new, more productive, inbound marketing approach, it’s still not time to hire. It's time for your next decision. Look for our next Dealbreakers article due out next week!