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At what point should one outsource e-marketing?
I am writing from the point of view of a small company in fact.
I'm a believer in the notion that if you want something done right you do should it yourself.
I also think that it's appropriate to pay people money, if you trust them, so that you can free up your time elsewhere.
But should marketing be done by you wherever possible anyway?
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3 Answers
You can do it right only if you have competency in a certain area. Some people believe that marketing ('e' or otherwise) is easy/intuitively obvious. Although it isn't rocket science, it is a skill/area of expertise where experience is likely to yield better results more quickly than 'on-the-job' training. You need to take a hard look at your company's internal resources and skills - do you have people with proven success in this area? If not, then hiring someone with expertise could have a payoff - stay engaged with the outsourcer, work with them, learn from them, and then maybe the 2nd, 3rd or 4th time out you do it yourself.
This is an excellent answer. I suppose that being a marketing expert is something that a lot of people fancy themselves as. My gut feeling, being a non-expert as you will have surmised but you were too polite to say so, is that it's easy to do at all but extremely difficult to do very well. My concern is that it's not sensible for me wasting time on a trial-and-error basis, when it could be better done by someone in the know, but, sorry to propose an alternative yet again, I feel that personalliy it is not possible to make an omelette without cracking the eggs for yourself sometimes.......
There are many aspects of e-marketing (online marketing) that have a strong technical nature in understanding and then there is understanding what your potential customers want. The latter you should never "outsource" or lose sight of. So yes, get deeply involved! There are so many tools with online marketing that will help you understand want your customer are looking for. So when I work with client as a team I help them to "see" better into the data sources to develop strategies of ways to test and measure your ideas.
As for the technical side of outsourcing, that makes a lot of sense. Keeping current both of the latest tools and techniques will consume a lot of your time. If your job is a truck driver if you are spending more time tuning/repairing the rig and less delivering the goods it will not take long before you slowing become less profitable. The truck is of course vital to your operation (aka the web marketing), but it's the goods you are hauling (what you sell) that is your key business objective.
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