Do You Need An ‘In House’ Marketer?

Is your business growing? Do you have countless marketing issues that you need to deal with daily but don’t have any time or idea for how to solve them? Having issues prioritising and understanding Search Engine Optimization, Website Development, Google Search Marketing, Social Media Marketing, and more? 

If you answered yes to these questions, you need some help and investing in marketing support can be a wise decision.  It may be worth considering hiring an ‘in-house marketer’, but there are other options that might be worth considering instead!

In the past, marketing was straightforward – create the biggest yellow pages ad that you could afford, pay the money and then wait for the phone to ring. However, with technological advancements, the marketing industry has become increasingly complex, dynamic and competitive between businesses. 

The Temptation to hire 

The leadership of many businesses today assume that the marketing role is an all-encompassing job, which comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between the different roles that form a marketing department. We see this regularly when our team starts working with the marketing person at a business. The first thing we come across most of the time is that the person is overwhelmed with tasks. 

Marketers often bear the responsibility for a business’s performance, with accusations of ‘your ads aren’t working’ or ‘why is our website rank declining?’ However, the fundamental understanding of the ‘Marketing’ role in any business is the cornerstone of developing an overall plan to help the business grow. While it would be ideal to have one person who is an expert in advertising, designing graphics, buying ads, managing social media, web design, SEO, project management and more, this is simply not realistic. 

It’s a multi disciplinary role

Is it a fair expectation to find this unicorn employee who is a multi-disciplined expert in all aspects of marketing? In reality, it’s challenging enough to find any good employee, let alone a marketing professional who can know all the ins and outs of this field. The marketing world is ever-evolving, therefore, keeping up to date with the latest trends and changes can be a difficult task. For instance, in 2020, Google made 4,500 changes to its search algorithm to improve user experience. Is it a fair expectation for your unicorn marketing employee to be on top of this every day? Is it a reasonable expectation that your marketer is also current on the latest social media strategies? I don’t think so; they won’t ever have the time.

Marketing goalposts move every day

The marketing environment is in a constant state of evolution. What worked last week potentially won’t work today. With the multitude of changes across various channels, such as the internet, branding, advertising, TV, radio, print and social media changes, effectively communicating your desired message is increasingly complex and ever-changing. 

What can leaders do to solve this complex problem?

Businesses need to understand that their employed marketer cannot be expected to handle all the challenges modern businesses face. Importantly, a single person can’t be expected to be the jack of all trades when it comes to marketing.

Designing and implementing a comprehensive marketing plan for a business is one of the most challenging aspects of marketing, which can be best understood and completed by marketing professionals. Additionally, this does not mean that all elements should be left to do on one’s own; help from a multi-specialist will be needed. 

The solution here is to look at a full service digital marketing agency. One that can understand your business and develop a multi-threaded marketing plan that considers the business’s aspects and how it can be implemented, tracked and funded.

A comparison of what you get when hiring people internally vs engaging an agency make this very clear. Spending the same investment with an agency enables you to get a portion of many different experts rather than just a couple of specialists.  To get in-house experts across the full range of marketing expertise is expensive and only worthwhile when you have the scale to keep all of those people delivering a strong ROI.

Discovery time

At R6 Digital we strive to understand your business by hosting a workshop where the goals of your business are discovered and documented. In some cases, these workshops uncover division of the business internally, peeling back of skills that were thought to be present or a general lack of preparedness to move forward. That’s ok; better to find out at an early stage.

From these workshops, we produce a focus document outlining the outcome and next steps. Businesses can decide on the path forward, being confident that a trusted process has been tested to work. There are times that these workshops have proved some are not ready to move forward. Overall this can save a business a lot of money. 

At R6 Digital, we understand the complexity of marketing, where we have assembled a team of over 40 experts with diverse skills and specialties, including branding, Web Development, Google Ads, SEO, Social Media, reputation management and more. Our team can produce effective and comprehensive marketing strategies, being flexible and adaptive to the changes in the digital marketplace.

Whilst a ‘Marketing Manager’ would be an all-encompassing solution to marketing needs, the reality is that to create effective marketing, it requires a skill set from a diverse team of specialists. Before you consider trying to find a marketing expert that does not exist, consider R6 Digital to be your group of unicorn marketeers. Each business has its own unique marketing needs, R6 Digital can provide customised solutions to suit your businesses goals in a cost-effective manner.