Should You Spend Your Time Or Money On Marketing?
I’ve heard it all when it comes to marketing. People who love creating their own content, people desperately trying to get away from doing their own marketing, and everyone in between feeling completely overwhelmed by their options.
Whether you’re someone who wants to keep marketing on your plate or wants to offload it completely, this is going to give you realistic expectations about budget, time, your capacity, and what’s actually going to be expected of you with each option.
Because here’s what I’m seeing: there are a lot of misconceptions about what your options actually are.
You Have Three Real Options (Not Just Two)
In anything in business, you really have three options when it comes to marketing. You can DIY it, you can do it with someone, or you can hire done for you. DIY, DWY, or DFY – those are the abbreviations you might see floating around.
DIY is pretty self-explanatory. You’re doing it yourself. You’re managing it yourself. You are doing all the research, you’re keeping up with all the trends, you are creating the content, you are implementing and getting everything out there on your own.
Done With You is the middle ground where you get strategic support but maintain control over implementation.
Done For You is where you hire somebody to do the work for you – whether that’s an agency or building your own marketing team.
The DIY Route: When It Works (And When It Doesn’t)
DIY is gonna be the most cost effective way to market your business because you’re not paying someone else to do it for you. You have full control over it because it starts and ends with you. You are the one leading it, creating it, writing it, deciding how everything looks.
You’re also the subject matter expert of your business. You know your product or service the most intimately. You’re likely the one speaking to your customers or clients the most. Even if you’re an e-commerce business and you’re not directly working with all the customers, you’re probably the mastermind behind your products and have a really deep understanding of your target market.
But here are the downsides: it’s gonna be the most time intensive for you because it is all you. If you are not the one doing it, it does not happen. You may also experience a much larger learning curve in a lot of these different areas. You’re gonna be the tech person setting up your email marketing. You’re gonna be the social media manager, you’re gonna be the one keeping up with trends, learning the video editing.
DIY is best for: People with very small budgets, very small businesses, businesses in the early stages of starting up. Usually the newer the business, the tighter the budget. Just kinda goes hand in hand while you’re ramping up your customer or client base.
If this is going to be your focus, you’re still gonna want to find resources that are going to teach you how to market your business. Courses, self-paced courses, eBooks, valuable newsletters that are gonna keep you updated with anything marketing related. Because you are the one DIYing it, you’re gonna need to be the one to obtain the information somehow.
Done For You: Maximum Convenience, Maximum Cost
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s done for you, where you hire somebody to do the work for you. That can be on pretty much any level – strategy, implementation, marketing assistance, really any area.
Within done for you, there are two different layers. You can hire and build your own marketing team, or you can hire an agency. There are pros and cons to both.
Agency pros: It’s gonna be the most convenient for you because you’re not gonna have to go through the hiring process. You’re not gonna be ultimately responsible for a team. You’re gonna have fewer team members for your business. You’re still gonna have the same outcome – deliverables handed over to you on a silver platter.
The downside is it’s going to have the highest cost associated with it because it is the most convenient. But where agencies give you maximum benefit is with one-off projects. The agency can just pull in a different specialty team member without you having to go out and hire for that one very small piece.
Building your own team pros: You’re gonna have more control over the team members. You’re gonna have direct oversight for anyone handling your marketing. It’s likely going to be lower cost because you’re hiring the team members directly, not hiring an agency to also oversee and manage the team for you.
But with hiring a team, you are either going to be the one managing the marketing and the marketing team, or you’re going to want to hire a marketing manager to do it for you.
Done for you is best for: Those with larger budgets, more established businesses, business owners that don’t want to DIY their marketing anymore, and people with more complex marketing needs. The larger your business, the larger your marketing strategy, the more moving pieces there are going to be.
Done With You: The Sweet Spot for Most Small Businesses
The middle ground is done with you, and this is gonna be the best for the business owner that doesn’t mind managing their own marketing activities or creating their own marketing pieces, but still needs help and support in the area of strategy.
The reason why I say “comfortable with doing their own marketing activities” is because usually that’s where a major cost driver is. When you’re trying to hire someone to be creating content for you on an ongoing basis, that can be very expensive because there’s a lot of time involved. Creating the content plans, creating the actual content, editing the content, making revisions to the content, scheduling it out – it is very time intensive.
Done with you options include consulting, mentorship, and one-off strategy sessions. These are really great to bridge the middle ground in terms of budget and costs while still being strategic with every single one of your marketing activities.
I think consulting is a really sweet spot because when I’m working with somebody in a consulting container, we’re able to review all of your content. I’m able to give you feedback and help you make adjustments to make that content more effective.
Here’s why this works: I’m able to see your business and your marketing from a larger perspective, from the bigger picture. You as the business owner, you are so close to your marketing and your business and the customers and clients. It can be really hard to see all of your options and grasp the bigger picture.
When I’m looking at your business, I’m able to see it from that fresh perspective. I don’t have all of these other pieces being noisy in my head the same way that you would.
The Time vs. Money Scale
When you’re thinking of your options, think of it like a scale. You have time on one side and money on the other. When you’re spending more time, it’s gonna cost less. If you’re spending more money, it’s gonna be less time. Done with you sits right in the middle – easiest on budget and on time.
You have to gauge: do you have more time or do you have more money? Do you wanna spend more time or do you wanna spend more money? As the business owner, these are the options you need to be weighing to decide what’s gonna be best for you.
What You Need to Sustain (This Is Critical)
The last thing I want to mention about hiring and your options is to consider what you’re going to be able to sustain budget and time-wise. Think of your marketing in 90-day increments. You have to be consistent with it for 90 days and evaluate how that goes before making any sort of adjustment.
At a very minimum, you need to be able to maintain either your time commitments or your budget commitments (or both if it’s a done with you option) for at least 90 days to really be able to see any sort of tangible result.
I’m not saying you’re necessarily going to see a monetary ROI within 90 days. If the first six or eight weeks you’re spending on foundational pieces, building things out, you’re not even gonna have anything into the real world until eight weeks in. Then you’re really looking at a four-week span of being able to generate money.
Ideally, you would be in this for the long run. Especially if you are doing organic marketing, that’s gonna take time and repetition. If you can go into this with a six, nine, or 12-month vision and you’re able to sustain it for that long, that’s gonna be the best case scenario. It’s gonna give you the time and freedom to be able to test things, refine them without being stressed out that you’re gonna spend all of your savings and need to make the money back within four weeks.
Why Done With You Makes Sense Right Now
In today’s economy, a lot of marketing budgets are getting cut, but you still need to be strategic. You still need to figure out a way to maintain that growth and momentum.
That’s exactly why consulting is such a great sweet spot right now. It’s not gonna be stressful forever, but you need realistic options that bridge the gap between having no strategic support and hiring a full agency or marketing team.
The Bottom Line on Strategy (Again)
Just because I offer marketing management doesn’t mean that’s something I’m going to recommend for you. Depending on the stage of your business and your budget, that may not be the best fit. We might need to figure out a way for you to DIY it with single strategy calls or have a done with you option.
But regardless of which option you choose, you absolutely need a strategy first. If you try to hire someone to implement your marketing without a strategy, you’re likely just gonna be wasting your money. It’s gonna be a situation where you’re just doing things to check off a box, and each part of your marketing is working independently instead of connecting together.
Your strategy doesn’t matter if you’re not able to implement it consistently. Don’t let it just sit in a Google Drive folder forever.
What’s Next?
Whatever option you’re leaning toward, remember that sustainability is key. Don’t choose something you can only maintain for a month. Choose something you can stick with long enough to actually see results.
Because at the end of the day, consistency beats perfection every single time in marketing.
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