If you’ve recently considered adding marketing services to your practice — or increasing your current marketing efforts — you’ve also probably considered how you will implement your campaigns. For most customers, this means one of two things: hiring an outside marketing group or developing your own “do-it-yourself” team and strategy.
As a business owner, you probably already have some great do-it-yourself experience. This “by your bootstraps” approach has gotten you this far, so it’s only natural to want to try your hand at marketing as well. While you’re evaluating your marketing implementation options, we encourage you to consider these three reasons to avoid a DIY approach.
Marketing is Complex – and Best Practices are Constantly Changing
While some marketing concepts remain the same (e.g., good marketing entails putting the right service in front of the right people at the right time), how you achieve these goals is quickly evolving. What worked even a year ago might not work so well today, and keeping up with these ever-changing trends is a full-time job. Expecting you or your staff to maintain knowledge of these trends and develop expertise in executing new strategies can be a significant strain on your practice.
Marketing is Not a Perfect Science
Many professional marketers would agree: marketing is as much an art as it is a science. Strong marketing teams will base their recommendations on performance metrics, but there are many variables that impact the outcome. Developing this understanding takes time and oftentimes money.
DIY Doesn’t Mean Cost-Savings
Although we encourage the practices we work with to think of their marketing “cost” as a marketing “investment”, we also recognize that expenses can be a burden on the practice. For this reason, you must be especially careful in how you leverage these funds.
Bad marketing efforts are costly. When you invest in a bad marketing campaign, you don’t only waste money on the campaign itself — an underperforming and expensive campaign also takes money away from other, more profitable projects. You must also consider your staff’s time as a cost of marketing as well. If your LASIK coordinator is spending time creating a marketing campaign, what other projects are left undone? We’re not saying that do-it-yourself marketing is always a bad idea, but we encourage our partners to exercise caution when choosing this strategy.