It never ceases to amaze me when I meet business owners who feel marketing is as an amusing hobby within their business duties. In one particular case I was told “I tried social media and I didn’t like it and anyways it doesn’t work, So why should I pay someone to do it when I can do it myself ! ”  So I decided to take a look and of course what I found were poorly thought out ads with horribly amateurish graphics that were obviously created by himself.

But what this ” Do-it-yourselfer ” doesn’t understand is that basic avoidable mistakes are most certainly costing his business a fortune in lost revenue and in most cases the precious credibility and trust they’ve worked so hard to build with their clients. Poor marketing fails to deliver your key message ( assuming a key message was even thought out ) thus your efforts are quickly forgotten, dismissed or even worse ridiculed and end up creating the opposite results.

Marketing is harder than most people think

Many business people live by the mantra “If you want something done right, you got to do it yourself”. But this mindset can and will slowly kill your business, believe me, I’ve seen it happen time and time again.

Let me give you an example: Imagine If I would try to build a sofa. I’d have to figure out how to do it, buy the materials, buy the right tools and then endlessly research the web on how to create a sofa. Let’s say it takes me 30 hours in all to create a sofa… That’s 30 hours I could of spent working on my business and making money not to mention the cost of tools and materials.

It’s ridiculous isn’t it ? Especially when you factor in how much your time is worth. So how much time are you spending blogging about your business? Or how much time are you spending trying to create a social media or adwords campaign per week ? Now multiply the amount of time spent per week by what you make per hour and that equals the amount of money your losing.

But wait ! There’s more…

If at least the result was amazing you could say it was worth it. But the fact of the matter is that if your honest with yourself, you’ll realize that the sofa you tried to create looks like crap and it probably ended up looking amateurish and laughable. Why Because you are not furniture designer. You are an entrepreneur with a whole different set of skills. The problem is that small business owners almost always never see these mistakes. They’re mistakenly proud of their efforts and believe they can check this task off their to do list and move on to the next task. However, when you produce amateurish “Do-it-yourself” marketing efforts, you will undoubtedly leave a bad impression in your customers mind. They’ll be apprehensive about doing business with you and will most certainly gravitate to your competitor who exudes a more cohesive, professional marketing effort.

So why on earth would you damage your company by doing it yourself ? Your job as an entrepreneur is not to literally do everything. Your job is to get the right people on board and provide them with the opportunity to do what they are best at so you and your business can prosper.

Could you do your company’s marketing? Sure, just like I could build a sofa… It would take me an eternity and it would look horrible…

But I could do it.