Marketing Buy VS Rent

If you are the CEO of a small but growing company, at some point you need to address the marketing issue and have marketing capabilities for your business. What’s the best way for you to do that? Should you hire somebody as an employee? Should you use an agency? Should you hire some freelance help? I want to give you some things to think about to help you make that decision.

And, not or
The first thing to know is that the world has changed dramatically. I’m sure you’re aware, and there’s a lot of resources that are very easy to apply in a non full-time, traditional W2 format. So the important thing to know now is you don’t have to choose between hiring somebody and using resources, contractually. The important thing is to understand what is the right mix of employees and vendors. 

Strategy before tactics
The way to do that is to start first with understanding what marketing can and can’t do for your business to help you achieve the goals that you have set. It seems counterintuitive because you are busy, your hair’s on fire, and it seems like the last thing you need to start marketing is thinking and planning. But if you don’t do that, it’s so easy to start doing things with marketing and marketing maybe more than any other function in your business, the tactics have a high failure rate. If you don’t know what to do and who needs to do it, you’ll waste a lot of time and resources and slow yourself down. So start first by figuring out what it is marketing is gonna help you achieve.

Identify jobs to be done
Once you’ve done that then you can identify what do we need to do to achieve that strategy in marketing?What are the tactics that makes sense and how do we apply them in our business? At that point, it will make much more sense and be much easier to decide… does it make sense to have an internal employee do that or is it vendors that do that? I have found that typically there’s a progression in a growing business. It starts with potentially some freelance work or consultants because you don’t have that much to do to start, and you really are just trying to find your way. You need someone that has some experience and as an expert in what they do, then at some point, as you grow, it makes sense to hire that first marketing employee. Depending on the other resources you bring in to help you, you would bring in an entry level person or a higher level person, a jack of all trades, someone who can do everything.

I have found that often the trade off here, is if you get strategic help, maybe a fractional CMO, then that frees you to hire an entry level or an early career marketer and bring them along with the help of the part-time, CMO. That allows you to scale as, as you grow the business. Then that person can be complimented with any missing skills through vendors or freelance work.

So the important thing is start with the end in mind, figure out what you need to do first with marketing, and then start applying those resources efficiently and that can scale as you grow.