Why YOU Need Professional Marketing For Your Business
Don't settle for having a friend or non-professional take on your marketing campaign. Professional marketing is always worth the investment.
Marketing isn’t just an important part of one’s company success. It is the company. Everything else one may do within their business depends on the quality of the marketing that they are producing. Without marketing, there are no sales. With no sales, you have no company.
However, small business marketing can be rough. Not only can opting for a professional marketing freelancer or firm get a little pricey, but it can be difficult to tell if the investment is worth it. Many business owners and entrepreneurs that are just starting out will get in contact with a friend who is hip and young– but not usually a trained marketing specialist– to help them improve their social media and overall marketing strategy.
However, when it comes to local marketing, it’s so incredibly important to opt for a professional to take on your marketing strategies.
If you’re considering or currently working with an intern, friend, or family member to handle your social media and digital marketing, keep reading. We’ll break down why professional marketing and marketing guidance is vital, and why your business deserves better.
What is Marketing?
Famed management guru Peter Drucker once said years ago, “Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two — and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation.”
Innovation is a conversation for another time, but we can easily break down what marketing is in the context of small businesses.
Marketing can be defined as activities and processes used within a business to create, communicate, deliver, and exchange offerings for customers and clients. Fundamentally, marketing is the main process of understanding your customer base and building relationships with that customer base. It’s the key to a business’s success, no matter what size it is.
There are so many different kinds of marketing as well, though much of today’s marketing is digital. This refers to social media marketing, banner and keyword advertising, email marketing, etc.
In general, marketing sales professionals within a business should seek out a unified approach and use automation tools to make their goals link together. If you choose to seek out professional marketing services from Distinct, we’ll work closely with you to ensure your marketing needs fit your sales needs, as they go hand in hand.
Marketing can be seen as a vital conversation. It’s the conversation that begins between two entities that don’t know one another well– namely, the brand and the target audience. In the case of business marketing, the brand will know more about the target audience than the target audience knows about the brand due to market research. However, the conversation that marketing represents can lead to improved understanding of needs. Marketing can provide great insights that could lead to excellent products or services that are delivered via engaging customer experiences.
Why is Marketing So Important?
“Marketing is not an event, but a process… It has a beginning, a middle, but never an end, for it is a process. You improve it, perfect it, change it, even pause it. But you never stop it completely.” — Jay Conrad Levinson, author of “Guerrilla Marketing”
Marketing is a fluid, ongoing process. It’s not as simple as asking an internet-savvy friend to make a few social media posts for you. It’s a group of strategies that look at both the long term and the short term. Just as well, there are a ton of reasons why marketing is so important.
Jenna Gross, the chief marketing officer (CMO) of Moving Targets spoke on the importance of marketing within a business in an article for the platform.
“On a base level, marketing is useful for customer education,” said Gross, “Sure, you know the ins-and-outs of your product but do your consumers? In order to buy into a product, your audience needs to have a solid understanding of what it does and how it works. According to Creativs, marketing is the most effective way to communicate your value proposition to your customers in a fun and interesting way. If consumer education is on your priority list then marketing should be too.”
Marketing also equalizes your business. Social media marketing and email marketing are quite accessible because they don’t cost a lot of money to launch. This creates a slightly more level playing field between small businesses and massively enterprises that dominate industries. Marketing can give small businesses a leg up, as business owners who invest a little money into hiring marketing firms can focus more on creating excellent customer experiences that large businesses simply can’t do because of their size. Today’s customer wants quality over prices, and small businesses that market will be able to create one-on-one experiences that could lead to conversions.
Marketing is also completely necessary for engagement. As we mentioned in the above section, marketing is a type of conversation between brands and customers. Customer engagement is vital for business success, especially for small businesses. Marketing can help you keep conversations going with your existing customers and possible future customers. Think about the “old days” of running a small business, before the internet was established. Much of a business’s success relied on intimate and positive interactions and conversations with customers. That’s marketing. Now, digital marketing is the core of most business marketing strategies– and a marketing firm can absolutely help small businesses capture the attention of potential customers.
Just as well, marketing is important because it sells. Like we mentioned earlier in this guide, if a business has no sales, it isn’t much of a business, is it?
“Marketing is important because it helps you sell your products or services,” Gross continued, “The bottom line of any business is to make money and marketing is an essential channel to reach that end goal. Creativs explained that without marketing many businesses wouldn’t exist because marketing is ultimately what drives sales. Sure, you need to have a good product but if people don’t know about your offerings to begin with then how can you generate sales? Put simply: You can’t. SMBs need to create fresh and inviting content to draw customers in and lead them to a purchase. Marketing helps sales and sales help your business – what more could you ask for?”
Finally, marketing can help businesses scale and grow. This is very important if you want your business to grow from being a startup or a small business. It’s a vital strategy that can ensure the growth of your company. Your current customers should always be the top focus of your marketing campaigns, but in order to grow, you’ll need to be able to appeal to new and broadened demographics. A good marketing campaign, especially social media and email campaigns, are excellent for engaging with customers that you already have as well as potential customers. A good marketing firm will be able to take on these campaign services for you.
Now that we’ve established what marketing is and why it’s so important, let’s break down why professional marketing is a must-have for small businesses today.
What is Professional Marketing?
Professional marketing is quite different from “amateur” marketing. To start, let’s break down what amateur marketing means and its relation to our initial definition of marketing.
To summarize what marketing is, it is the group of processes and activities that are utilized within a business to create, communicate, deliver, and exchange offerings for customers and clients. Amateur marketing could be described as a marketing service provided by someone who is not trained or experienced in digital marketing and marketing strategies.
For many startups and small businesses, amateur marketing may seem like the only way to go to ever have marketing in place. It may seem like a good idea to have a friend or family member (or even yourself) take on the task of marketing and advertising your business. However, this really isn’t ideal. Without knowledge and experience in marketing, you don’t really know what to do. Some aspects of marketing may seem self-explanatory, such as social media marketing, but that isn’t always the case. A professional marketing firm or marketing advisor is a superior option, even if it requires a bit of an investment.
Professional marketing refers to services and processes, as well as guidance, provided by a marketing specialist or marketing firm team. Marketing professionals have experience and work with communication and sales strategies to craft excellent ad campaigns and marketing strategies on a case-by-case basis. The role of the professional marketing specialist is an important one when it comes to positioning a brand within their respective market, as well as for any form of communication and the financial return on investment that the business owner will expect. Marketing specialists may also try to help a business improve areas of contact and brand relevance by assisting with digital transformation. Today’s marketing specialists (including each of our excellent team members at Distinct) are prepared and educated about new technologies and digital business changes that occur on a regular basis.
It’s no secret that marketing is a broad area to work with, complete with many different disciplines. Individuals who work within marketing tend to specialize in many subjects that include marketing. These subjects include business administration, social communication, advertising, SEO, sales, social media, business management, consumer psychology, data science, market analysis, etc.
What Does a Professional Marketing Specialist or Firm Do?
As mentioned above, professional marketing specialists will be skilled in a number of different things that relate to business, especially marketing. But what exactly do they do for businesses that hire them, and what makes them so different from those providing amateur marketing?
In a write up for B2B Marketing, chairman and CEO of Burgeoning Technologies LLC, Waqar Hassan, broke down the complexities of what a marketing specialist does– namely, that a marketing professional will take on different roles depending on individual client needs.
“What marketing professionals do cannot be described in a few words, because depending on the type of business their job description changes,” said Hassan, “At some companies, they are only taking care of advertising whereas in other companies they are involved in every process from the concept of the product to its shipping to the customers. Regardless of how much work they have to do or how tight their schedules are, marketing professionals are creative people who can change the way the world moves with their skills.”
An amateur marketer may understand the ins and outs of basic social media management, such as posting updates and comments that interact with their target audience. They may even understand a bit about how to place ads and write content. However, a professional marketing specialist will do this and so much more. Where an amateur advisor may simply make posts on a weekly schedule and answer some comment questions, a professional advisor will use automation tools to provide regular social media posts, engage with your audience in more ways than through comments, craft excellent content that converts, and manage your social media advertising campaigns to ensure top-quality ad bids. They can curate content that can attract your target market and make the advertising and SEO decisions that an amateur marketer simply won’t have the know-how to complete.
A marketing professional can also provide you with valuable insights and reports. The average internet user is often left scratching their heads at analytics tools, but marketing professionals know how to implement and use these tools to see how well your marketing endeavors are working and whether or not another strategy should be used. To put it simply, marketing professionals can provide you with a better big-picture idea of what your marketing campaigns do for your business, all while breaking down complex marketing concepts so that you can understand how they work and why they work.
“Marketing professionals can actually see the end results of their work,” Hassan continued, “Even a slightest change made to the logo of a company resonates for decades and centuries if it gets hit in the market. The job is not easy for sure. Not to mention, there are businesses in which the marketers have to act like sales people. All the pressure that is supposed to be on the sales professionals ends up being on the marketing professionals. However, this pressure doesn’t feel big when you can see your creativity manifesting itself in the company’s products, services, ideas and everything that you have worked on.”
Marketing specialists, especially those who work with Distinct, find fulfillment in the challenge of ensuring your marketing campaigns are working. They have the experience to know what changes to your brand will be beneficial and what processes and practices work for your industry and niche. Just as well, they are also well-rounded when it comes to understanding new tools for automation that can make your business run smoother, at least when it comes to marketing. There is a ton of value there for just one freelance marketing specialist or marketing firm. Who wouldn’t invest in that?
Why is Professional Marketing So Important?
In our opinion at Distinct, we believe professional marketing is important for a number of reasons. A few big reasons that marketing professionals are valuable include the following:
- You’ll have access to extremely creative minds that have a ton of experience when it comes to creating marketing campaigns. Most business owners and amateur marketers aren’t incredibly creative– and that’s okay! You’re a business professional and business owner, and things that involve scaling and perfecting your business should be your primary focus. Even if you consider yourself to be creative, marketing specialists have multiple years of experience in the industry as creatives and know what to do to create memorable campaigns that convert. Seeking out professionals in a marketing firm such as copywriters, designers, and marketing specialists that have a creative background could be massively beneficial to your business. You’ll save time and, in the long run, you’ll save money by investing in a marketing firm.
- You will have access to a broad scope of marketing expertise, as each individual in a marketing team brings unique skills to the business and, thus, your marketing campaigns. Marketing teams work in tandem to provide a wide range of marketing services that an amateur marketer won’t really be able to provide. There’s power in numbers, experience, and expertise. That’s worth investing in.
- Marketing agencies have more of a work ethic than someone who is helping you with your marketing campaigns for free or very little money. An agency like Distinct is willing to work hard for your business and those within the agency understand that they need to constantly prove their value to their clients. Each and every month that an agency works with you is an opportunity for them to go above and beyond in terms of service.
- You can access new, fresh, and different ideas. Amateur marketers may not be able to provide you with the best possible marketing or advertising ideas, as they don’t have the experience they need in the marketing and advertising world. Just as well, if you’re a small business who has been around for a bit, it’s easy to start revolving around the same ideas. Take a look at your current campaigns. Are they all starting to look the same and use the same language or imagery? Coming up with new creative can be extremely difficult and, again, you’re a business owner– you really don’t need to be focusing on these things if you have a marketing firm at your disposal. A marketing agency can provide you with fresh ideas that can rejuvenate your campaigns, and your target market will notice pretty quickly.
- Local-based marketing agencies like Distinct have their own sets of “pros.” Through these types of marketing firms, it is easier to have live meetings. These marketing firms also boast local knowledge and connections that can strengthen communities and provide valuable insight for your local business. Just as well, local marketing firms are often much more inexpensive than large marketing enterprises that are exclusively remote and possibly based outside of your country. And, of course, communication tends to be substantially quicker.
- Marketing specialists have a number of areas of expertise. Full-service marketing agencies like Distinct have entire departments that are dedicated to various aspects of marketing. Our marketing advisors are skilled in creative, marketing, and customer service. Our web designers are skilled in development, coding, and web design. These departments are headed by senior management that boasts years of experience. An amateur marketer simply can't provide omnichannel marketing services that way a marketing firm with a powerhouse team can. The cost of hiring a marketing firm can provide you with a ton of skill at your disposal.
- You’ll have more time to focus on the things you should be doing as a business owner. A marketing agency like Distinct will take on all of your marketing needs and be there for guidance. We’ll only take on as much as you wish to relinquish control. By taking this approach, you’ll be able to concentrate on things like micromanagement and company culture instead of spending a ton of time monitoring your analytics or managing your amateur marketer’s processes. Instead, you can let a marketing firm take care of your marketing endeavors and processes with a sense of peace, so you can focus on perfecting and scaling your business.
In a write up for Business 2 Community, APAC Sales and Marketing Director for BusinessesForSale.com Faye Ferris broke down the true value of investing in a professional marketing agency like Distinct. Specifically, she focused on the most obvious reason why business owners should opt for a pro– going the amateur route could be a waste of money and time.
“As a business owner, your ultimate goal is to broaden your reach, increase traffic to your website, engage your visitors, and ultimately convert them to customers or donors,” said Ferris, “But, unless you’re a seasoned marketer, you might not know exactly how to do that. Why waste your precious time and dollars trying to figure out something you don’t fully understand when you can just let the experts do it for you? A successful marketing company knows how to write engaging content that will attract visitors to your site and organically grow traffic. They will also help your company create an email marketing strategy that will nurture those leads and convert them to customers through lead segmentation, A/B testing, and search engine optimization.”
Just as well, being able to focus on the aspects of your business that actually require the business owner is vital, especially in terms of time management
“Hiring a marketing agency enables you to stay focused on growing your business, improving operational flow, and creating a better product or service,” Ferris continued, “You don’t have time to monitor social posts, write a blog, or devise a clever email strategy. Let the marketing experts craft compelling content on social platforms, emails, and blogs that will resonate with your target audience and motivate them to engage with your brand. Your time should be spent where you will be most effective: developing relationships with your employees and establishing strategic partnerships that will propel your business forward.”
Are There Any Cons to Hiring a Marketing Firm?
This is a good question, and one worth exploring. When it comes down to it, nothing in this world is perfect. There are indeed a couple of downsides to hiring a marketing firm.
To start, marketing firms and professionals can definitely be expensive. After all, they are businesses with their own expenses, salaries, and taxes to pay. However, marketing firms will often offer a variety of pricing packages that you can choose from to suit your unique marketing needs. It’s also worth considering how a talented and respectable marketing firm will provide you with an ideal ROI. If you’re using an amateur marketer for free, over the course of a year, you may see little to no improvement in your sales. With a marketing firm, you are putting money into that firm, but the firm is generating revenue for your business. Over time, those services will essentially cover themselves as your business scales.
Just as well, some agencies may not have very experienced marketing specialists. This is a big deal when it comes to hiring a marketing agency to take on your marketing workload. Education and technical know-how are vital, but that knowledge increases in value when it is put into practice. Luckily, the marketing team at Distinct has the reputation and combined experience in marketing and business industries to provide you with the best possible marketing services.
The quality of the work you receive from a marketing professional or a marketing firm could vary quite a bit. However, this also applies to amateur marketers– your friend in college may be decent at marketing, or they could be completely clueless. At least with a marketing firm like Distinct, you can gain at least some sort of insight into the experience and quality a marketing firm can offer by looking up reviews from previous customers.
Why You Shouldn’t Opt for Having a Friend Take on Your Marketing
We get it. Maybe you have a friend or colleague that is young and cool, and might seem like they know what they’re doing when it comes to digital marketing. However, it’s important to see how this could be a pretty bad idea when it comes to launching your business. If you needed a lawyer or surgeon, you probably wouldn’t contact your college student family member who is in law or medical school. Instead, you’d invest in hiring an experienced professional. It’s not different when it comes to marketing. The processes within marketing may not seem like they’re important enough in your business to invest money into, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Marketing is the backbone of your business. As such, you’ll really need to invest in professional help to keep your marketing processes scalable and conversion-friendly.
In a marketing guide for Small Biz Daily, Jenna Cyprus sympathized with business owners who struggled to see the value in professional marketing, but also broke down why a self-run marketing campaign could be disastrous for inexperienced entrepreneurs.
“Most small business owners find it challenging to plan a marketing budget,” said Cyprus, “They don’t have the expertise required to launch and manage a frugal marketing campaign on their own, but hiring a marketing agency often seems expensive — sometimes costing thousands of dollars a month for a running campaign. If you own and run the business by yourself most of the time, you could try your hand at running your own marketing campaign. All it will cost you is time, and you may be able to make your brand more visible in relatively short order. The problem here is lack of experience; a bad marketing campaign can hurt your image more than help it, resulting in wasted time and a damaged reputation. This also isn’t scalable; as your business demands more of your time, you won’t be able to keep up with your marketing needs.”
Cyprus also went on to describe what entrepreneurs are really paying for when it comes to opting for a marketing agency. That money, especially when going to a reputable marketing firm like Distinct, goes to very specific things.
“Where is that money going? Some of that depends on the marketing agency,” Cyprus continued, “ost agencies will have a dedicated account representative to talk with you, learn more about your brand, help brainstorm new ideas and measure how your campaign is going. You’ll also be paying for the right to access a full team of experienced staff members, usually ones who have varying fields of expertise in different areas. Some agencies specialize in one type of marketing, while others are full-service and are more diverse in what they can offer. Marketing agencies tend to be more efficient at securing a high ROI, in part because they have access to the professionals necessary to execute creative, effective campaigns, but also because they’re committed to retaining your business. They have a vested interest in your success and will do whatever they can to earn you benefits in excess of what you paid to hire them in the first place.”
Distinct Can Help You Kick Your Marketing Up a Notch
At Distinct, we understand the needs of business owners and nonprofit organizations when it comes to marketing guidance. We also understand the value in helping our local small businesses find success and enrich the community they are a part of.
So what can Distinct do for you? We’re a team of professional marketing advisors and designers that specialize in professional marketing services for our clients. Our mission is to help you optimize your business with highly customizable marketing support. Essentially, we break down complex marketing strategies to help you understand what is needed for your business, all while utilizing skilled marketing agents and tools to provide the perfect amount of support that you need.
If you have a clear vision of your business, the team at Distinct wants to help you implement it in a way that is tangible and successful. As noted in this guide, we understand that many businesses, particularly startups and small businesses, may not be investing as much money into their marketing endeavors as they should be. At Distinct, we recommend spending around 12-20% of your revenue on marketing. Once we’ve helped you become more established and comfortable with your marketing techniques, typically that amount will be reduced to 6-12%. And with all the ups and downs of experimenting with different marketing strategies, the team at Distinct will be there for you to scrap old plans and try new ones until we can find one that is successful for your niche.
Our main priority at Distinct is to provide the best possible personalized services in marketing to our clients. We utilize local marketing advisors that can help you tailor your vision and support your unique needs as a business owner. We also believe that communities become their best and most stable when the businesses and individuals inside collaborate with one another. Because of this, we work with our clients to connect them with their communities via the Distinct Wave. If you choose to opt into this service, you’ll be able to support other local companies while utilizing cross-promotion. We truly believe that strong local connections can lead to more successful businesses on a local level.
Ready to take the dive and improve the marketing ability of your business? Get in touch with us today to learn more about our services, pricing packages, and more.
How was our in-depth guide to professional marketing and why it is so important? We want to hear what you think and what your experience with professional marketing has been like in the comments below!
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