I wanna talk about hiring, and not just hiring in general, but when you add marketing support to your team. Because this is, yes, admittedly different for a lot of people, but I wanna kind of … get rid of some of the illusions that you have to do something by a certain point, but also help you understand some of the things that are helpful to have in place before you bring someone on, anyone really.
And we’re gonna talk a little bit about the different ways you can add marketing support to your business, either with me and my team or with someone else. I’m not super attached to that, I just wanna make sure that, when you’re hiring, you’re hiring for the right reasons. Because I feel that when you have a real understanding of the things we’re gonna talk about today, it helps prevent some of the horror stories that I hear from clients who come to work with me about past experiences with other people. It also helps prevent getting caught up in the idea that you have to, need to, must, should do something.
So what do you say we dig in first by talking about the different ways you can hire a marketing person? Or get marketing support. I think oftentimes we immediately think of a social media manager, which is great. But that’s not the only option. There are a ton of marketing options.
First, you could hire a virtual assistant who understands the marketing stuff.
There are a lot of marketing-focused, social media-focused, email-focused virtual assistants, as well as OBMs, online business managers. They can be a fantastic resource. You can hire a social media manager, you can hire a marketing coach who will help you DIY some of these things a little more effectively. You could hire a digital marketing strategist like me. You could hire a social media strategist, or an email or a content strategist. You can hire a digital marketing agency like mine. You can hire an email marketing, a content marketing, a social media marketing agency.
There are a lot of ways to start getting marketing support, so don’t put yourself in a box of “Oh, I have to hire a social media manager, that’ll handle my digital marketing”, because all of those positions, all of those expertises, are slightly different. Some are more similar than others.
Also, the frustrating part for people hiring into these roles is that sometimes people categorize themselves differently than their expertises maybe really are, which can be super frustrating when it comes time to hire because the way you’re talking about something might not be in line with the way they’re talking about something.
This is why I wanna be talking today, and this is why we’re gonna shift into this conversation now, is to really talk about needs, to really talk about what purpose you want this person to fill in your business, and hiring based on that versus hiring based on title. Because not everyone titles themselves super clearly. I, for one, I’m totally raising my hand on this, I have bounced around, digital marketing strategist, social media strategist, way back in the day I was a social media manager, but I don’t do that anymore, now I’m a digital marketing agency owner and a digital marketing trainer. And I still fuss with my title depending on who the audience is, quite frankly.
But, for me, so many people consider social media marketing digital marketing, they lump email and content and all of it under social when that’s not technically true, that I tend to lead with social. I tend to put social forward when, in reality, I talk and am knowledgeable on and teach and all the things … All things digital marketing. So again, there is sometimes some play here, that’s why I want to talk, and we’re gonna jump into this first, I wanna talk needs first.
When you’re sitting down to hire whoever, you gotta go through a checklist, you gotta go through an internal process, and this is a great thing to do with a business buddy, or a coach, or a mastermind group, just to get some external feedback, and honestly to push you to go deeper and to say “What else, what else, what else?”
So write these down, or if you want to print out the whole transcript on the show notes page, but write down what you need to go through, and we’ll jump into some examples and how to move through this.
The very first thing, though, is gonna be what do you need off of your plate? What do you need support in? That may be content, that may be getting your blog post, podcast, video, whatever literally onto the internet. Maybe that’s editing, maybe that is helping brainstorm ideas, maybe that’s full-on creation. Maybe that is just uploading and optimizing.
Whatever it is, what in the content arena, if anything, do you need support on? And if it’s nothing right now, that’s okay. But be real honest as you move through this. And this is, again, I’m gonna say this a couple times, why it’s helpful to get support as you’re moving through this because they will keep you accountable to the “and what else? And what else?” part of this.
Number two, let’s talk social.
I’m thinking maybe somebody to actually post your social, to create your graphics, to create a content calendar for your social, to repurpose past content you’ve written into social. Maybe it’s strategy, maybe you’re fine with actually posting and creating, but you need somebody to tie you’re social together and say, “This is where you need to be and this is how often.” Maybe it’s just the scheduling part, you’re writing everything and you just need someone to, again, kinda like your content, put it on the internet.
Figure that out, what does that look like for you? In all of these, go ideal. What is the ideal solution? What is your ultimate, best ever, if I could wave a wand and this thing happened today, what does that look like?
Moving into the email.
Is that somebody creating nurture sequences for you? Is that somebody helping build up funnels? Is that somebody who is optimizing what you already have, sending out your weekly, biweekly, monthly newsletter? Is it somebody who is just optimizing and cleaning up your list? Helping you with segmentation? Those kinds of things. I want you to look really, really clearly at wherein these three categories …
Because again, we’re talking about digital marketing today. I’m not talking about admin support, I’m not talking about public relations support, I’m not talking about speaking support. I’m just talking about building out your digital marketing support team. Do you want help with one of these things? All of these things? None of these things? Now, in addition to those things, I want you to look at another category that way too often people forget about.
Your paid advertising.
This could be Google, maybe it’s full-on Paperclip Google Ads, it could be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, it could be Yelp, it could be a myriad of things. Whatever your paid advertising online is, do you need support there?
And then our final category is SEO optimization.
Do you need support optimizing your content, optimizing your website, getting your website to rank for certain keywords? Maybe it’s literally getting people in the door. Maybe you have a physical location. I know we have some listeners of the show who have actual studios, like yoga studios, fitness locations. They do coaching in-person via either therapy or life coaching or whatever. We do have some of those people listening to the show, so maybe that’s you.
I work out of a physical location, so that’s been a part of my optimization in the last … Let’s see, we’ve been in a physical location for about a year now, year and a half maybe. That was a big shift for me, “Okay, so I need to pay attention to actually ranking in my area,” because I do work with clients in my neighborhood, so to speak.
So figuring out, again, where in this spectrum you need support, and getting all of it down in a document. And again, and I know I’m reiterating some of this stuff, but I really want you to get comfortable with the idea of looking at, ultimately, again, very magic wand, I wave it, this is what that looks like. This is the support team I now have in my business. We’ll get into reality soon enough, but first, start with “What are my needs and wants right now for digital marketing support?”
Then, the heavy hand of reality sets in, and we start talking about the budget. How much can you currently afford to invest in your marketing? Now, this is a loaded question, and I worded it very specifically because this is the language so many of you use when you’re talking to me, or you’re talking to your business friends, or you’re talking to a coach about investing, or really what you’re probably saying is “spending” on marketing support.
Here’s the deal: marketing support, more than anything else, and this is a big woohoo for me as somebody who sells it, has a direct correlation to ROI. Oftentimes, though, when you start thinking about “I don’t know if I can afford to hire somebody, what am I gonna do, is there gonna be an ROI,” there’s usually a situation where you’ve been burned in the past and/or you’ve heard stories of people getting burned in the past. And that’s why that step one happens first.
Let’s get super clear on where you wanna plug someone in because, guess what, there are lots of budget ways to get support.
So we start incrementally working towards that dream scenario. I’m, over the next few months, going to have some clients on, and I wanna talk about exactly this with them because oftentimes we have clients who have worked with me incrementally until they’ve gotten to a point where they’re now in our agency side getting done-for-you services.
They didn’t start there, though. We have a lot of clients who started with once a month one-on-one calls with me, so that I could literally help them make decisions so they could DIY as best they could. Or, as they added a virtual assistant who was doing a lot of admin stuff for them, they could also schedule the content. So they started with monthly calls with me.
We’ve had people who now have had strategy builds who started in backstage, back when it was $25 a month, it was even less than it is now. They started there, they got the support they needed, and so they could get to a place where it made sense for them to invest in a strategy because A, they had the foundational skills, but also they used those foundational skills to increase their revenue so they could get closer and closer and closer and closer to working with me in other ways, hiring their team, growing their team, getting the support they needed.
So there are a lot of ways this can look. But when you look at your needs, and when you look at your budget.
Start figuring out where you can start to fit it into your budget. There is not one magic number that I’m going to give you, I really wish there was. I can give you my prices, send me an email, I and the team will help you out, but people work in a variety of ranges.
I very intentionally have services that scope from $40 a month to join backstage to four figures a month to join us at done-for-you services inside the agency. Get really clear on what your budget is right now. Then start looking at getting some support.
And also realizing that some of these things aren’t regular, recurring costs. Getting some SEO set up may not be an ongoing monthly cost that you have to pay for years and years and years. You may find somebody who can, as a project, just optimize what you’ve got, get your foundation going. And then install things like Yoast, which is a WordPress plugin, to help you then, or your team then, in-house manage moving forward. Maybe it’s working with someone like me to build a digital marketing strategy, and then having your VA, who is probably less expensive than my team is, to implement it.
You can make this work in a lot of ways. But it doesn’t get … understandable on who you need and where you can put people until you have a clear understanding of your needs and your budget. So sit down and do that work, look at where in your budget you can invest.
The other thing to consider is if you are hiring someone to run ads for you, you’re not just looking at the cost of labor, as it were. You’re not just looking at the cost of them actually creating the ads, you’re actually gonna need to factor in your ads budget as well, which …
Here’s a big thing, and I’m gonna get into this next piece in just a second, but this is the beginning of it, which is until you have a real clear understanding of what your monthly ads budget is, don’t hire someone to run ads for you. Because that’s where you start getting into a really slippery slope of feeling like you’re not getting a return on that investment because you don’t have a real clear picture at what you can afford to spend. You don’t have a real clear budget line item for your advertising.
And that’s really what this budgeting piece comes down to, is I want you to actually plan to spend X amount of dollars on your marketing. That X amount of dollars might go to support, that X amount of dollars is gonna go to ads, that X amount of dollars is gonna include your marketing tools, maybe that’s a social media scheduling tool, maybe that’s your email marketing campaign tool.
Those tools need to be in your budget, and quite honestly a lot of people who I talk to, a lot of the people who are coming into backstage or even starting with me in BAM or even getting on the phone with me to build strategies or talking to us about agency services … They don’t yet have a line item for their marketing. They don’t yet know how much they’re currently spending and/or how much they are willing to spend every month on their marketing, or every year on their marketing or any of it at all, ever.
So get super clear and honest about where you’re investing your money in your business, and what of that is marketing, and where you have room to add to that marketing investment. Because that clarity will help you identify who it is you need to hire. Now, we’ve figured out kinda what you want, and we’ve figured out how much you can spend.
The next thing I wanna make sure you’re super clear on is why you wanna invest in bringing on marketing support.
A lot of times we see people bring in marketing support before they have a really clear picture over what the result is from that. So straight up figure out where do you plan to see the ROI.
I really encourage you to look at where you’re currently profitable, where you’re currently generating consistent revenue, and doubling down on that and saying, “I know X, Y, Z offering can sell, I wanna bring in a support team to sell more X, Y, Z. I wanna bring in support to leverage this revenue source that we have.” If you don’t yet have a place where you are reliably profitable, reliably selling something, it’s not yet time to spend money to try and sell more.
I know this can feel counterintuitive because you’re saying to me, “But I don’t get marketing, maybe that’s why I’m not selling it.” You gotta prove that something has market value, you have to prove that something can be sold before you go and spend a ton of money on marketing it. So if that’s where you’re at right now, and you’re saying, “I’ve got this thing that I know could sell, and I’ve sold maybe one or two of them,” then you’re really looking at bringing somebody in who can help you DIY better market that.
So something like my VIP days, something like a one-off one-hour call with somebody, something like backstage, something where you’re gonna get a little bit of support and guidance on how to better DIY market is probably where you’re gonna be at.
On the flip side of that, if you’re somebody who is generally generating revenue from your product or service, and you just wanna supersize that and you wanna take the marketing off your plate because you don’t have time for it, and maybe what you’re running into now is that rollercoaster of “I have no clients, and so I market, and then I have clients so I don’t market because I don’t have time”, that’s when it’s a really good idea to bring in some support.
Because bringing in some support, and getting the marketing piece off your plate so it can happen consistently without you having to be in the day-to-day of it, is how you can get out of that rollercoaster. It’s how you can really start to leverage this thing that you are already profitable with. So think about that. Knowing really clearly where you’re gonna get your money back on this investment is the key to getting your money back on a marketing investment.
Again, if you do not have that yet, look for support on where you can get more information about DIY-ing successfully. Again, that might be a one-hour call with a coach, that might be a half-day intensive, that may be a full-day intensive, that may be a training or a course, something like that. Whatever it is for you. And if you want help figuring that out, start asking your community. Ask your business friends, ask me, ask whoever. Start asking people, “When you were here, what did you do?” And that’ll help give you some insights and some next steps.
The thing I wanna wrap it up with is this may be more than one person. Part of the reason I launched my agency, which we’re gonna be talking about more, I know I’ve kind of hinted in the last few episodes about this, we’re gonna be talking about it more in the next couple of episodes, when I announce the name and all of those things.
But a big part of why I launched the agency is there’s not a ton of places where you can get all the things in one place. That is genuinely why my new agency exists because I really wanted there to be a place where companies who are not in a position or do not have the desire, to have in-house marketing teams can essentially contract a marketing team. So that’s what my agency does, we are a contract marketing team. We are the marketing department for your company, we’re just not full-time for you. You can use us on a basis that makes way more sense for you with our monthly retainer packages.
So that’s why I built that. You may not find a lot of places that can do all the things, you may not find any. So this may be more than one person, and that’s okay. It may be that you get a strategy built by someone like me, and then you have your existing VA team who’s helping you with admin do the scheduling, and you do the content creation. That works perfectly, that works beautifully. I’ve had a lot of clients have success with exactly that same formula.
It may be that you hire one company to handle your email sequences and setting up your funnels and all of that, and you hire someone else to do your social media management, and you have a contract podcast editor who does the podcast editing, and then you do the actual uploading. All of that’s fine. This can absolutely be more than one person, and it might work best for you if it is.
However, if you want it to be one person it’s probably not going to be one human being. It’s very likely going to be something like my agency, and I’m not saying it’s gotta be my agency, but that’s what I’m using as an example because I know it … Where there’s a lot of people inside of one team that can check these boxes. It’s one of the reasons I love working with agencies, is because I can access a wealth of knowledge instead of having one jack of all trades on my team. So figuring out that your one person may not be one human being, they may, in fact, be several human beings that just work in one agency or one team, is gonna be really helpful.
I want to leave you with this idea that you can get support. You can absolutely get the help you crave, it just needs to be front-ended with thinking through some things. So go through what we talked about today, figure out exactly, in your dream scenario, what this looks like, and realize that once you start moving down this road and hiring people incrementally, your dream scenario may change. That’s cool.
Set your budget, figure out where you can invest, how much you can invest, and then start figuring out how you can move towards, step by step, that dream scenario. Again, it may start by just having your current admin do some scheduling. It may start by working with a coach to get some clarity. It might start with having someone build you a strategy. Whatever that first step is, make that investment, and then the next one, and then the next one.
What’s great is when you have a plan and when you have a strategy it gets a lot easier to identify those needs. It gets a lot easier to maximize that budget. It makes a lot of sense to make these decisions from a strategic standpoint. So do that.
All right, so that’s the show. I wanna remind you that we have a couple of spots left this year for VIP days. I think we have one or two left in November and that’s it for 2018. We’ve already sold VIP days for the beginning of 2019, I think we have one sport in January and one spot in February left, and then two spots in March. That’s Q1 that has four spots left.
So if you want some support from me working through this stuff, I’d love to sit down with you and figure out what that looks like, figure out if it’s a fit for you. We’re gonna, I’m gonna be honest, walk through some of the things we talked about today. So absolutely head over to the website, look at the VIP day information. If you wanna know more about the agency, because as I’ve been sort of mentioning it because I’m not very good at keeping secrets, I’ve gotten some questions, stay tuned. You can email me, I might answer them if I can.
But we have a lot more information coming on that in the next couple of weeks, in the next couple of episodes I’m gonna be sharing the name, I’m gonna be sharing the role this company serves, why I decided to make this decision, or why I made the decision I made in launching the agency. We’re gonna talk about a ton more if you’re curious stay tuned for that.
And we’ll probably follow it up with a Facebook Live where we do more Q&A because I know a lot of you have questions about agency models and that kind of thing. I’m by no means an agency model expert, in fact I think I’m going to speak to a friend of mine who is an agency model expert and see if we can get her on Hit the Mic TV and do a little interview with her, because she knows more about agency stuff than I do. I’m one foot in front of the other right now, guys, figuring this stuff out.
Thank you for listening, thank you for being a part of this community. If this episode was helpful for you, and I certainly hope it was, do me a solid, A, let me know because I just like to hear from you. B, share it with somebody, share it with somebody who needs this information. Share it in a Facebook group where you and your bus friends are hanging out and all commiserating all over this stuff. Share it on your social channels, whatever. Let’s get some good information out, I would appreciate that.
And finally, I would be absolutely obsessively in love with the idea of you leaving a review for the show. Shoutout to my client Tara Newman who does this with The Bold Leadership Revolution so, so well. I agree with her, reviews are podcast currency. So if you love this show and you want more of this show, leave a review so we can help more people find the show. It’s a great way to thank your favorite podcast hosts. So while you’re there, leave reviews for five other shows that you love.
I think that’s all I’ve got. If you have any questions, or you wanna hang out with me, do so on Instagram and Facebook, that’s where I spend the most time, Instagram over Facebook, but whatever, that’s where I spend the most time. And I will see you on Thursday for the live show, and of course, right here on your favorite iTunes, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, insert your favorite podcast listening location here, next Tuesday. Have a great week. Bye.
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