Why Hiring a Professional Marketer is Good for Your Small Business
One of our strategic partners, Eagle Soars Consulting, has written a good piece explaining why investing in a professional marketer/designer is good for your business. The points they make aren’t restricted to the quality of work you can expect, though of course such work is almost always far superior to what non-marketing small business owners can produce. They also point out that the ROI is better when you hire a professional.
Some of the advantages of hiring a professional marketer or web designer or copywriter are
They bring objectivity and aren’t blinded to customer needs by being too close to the operation of the business.- You can offload the creative burden to them, reducing the strain on you and/or your employees’ time and attention. That allows you to continue to focus on what you do best: running your business.
- A professional can produce effective marketing copy. That’s far more than simply grammatically correct text — it’s a compelling customer-focused story that motivates readers to want to do business with you and only you.
- Professionals help with managing deadlines, and aren’t distracted by business emergencies you may be exposed to. In the constant battle between what’s important and what’s urgent, the professional you hire can focus on the important marketing issues and free you up to handle the urgent issues in your business.
- When you add up the true cost of doing it yourself — salaries, overhead, lost productivity, distractions, and so forth — using outside professionals is almost always less expensive.
The article by Eagle Soars Consulting is focused on marketing consulting, copywriting and web design. But it also applies to search engine optimization. Sure, our blog of more than seven years provides tons of information that (given the time and inclination) can be implemented by you, a small business owner. But our experience and that of our clients is that the folks at Eagle Soars Consulting are quite right. It’s easier, better — and cheaper — to invest in professional help.
Alas, driving lots of visitors to your website isn’t enough either. The web site has to close the deal and make the sale. That’s an entirely different process from SEO. It doesn’t help your bottom line if SEO gets you great rankings in the search engines and those rankings drive lots of visitors to your site who don’t become customers. If your visitors can’t find what they want to buy, all the preceding effort to design a website and optimize it is thrown away. If the website is confusing, if it reads awkwardly, if it has spelling or grammatical errors that make people think you don’t pay attention to details, or even if the website doesn’t have an effective progression from entering the site to closing the sale — any of those problems can render all the other work on the website useless.
Very often statistics from your email newsletter host will show that a relatively small percentage of readers actually click on any links to your website or blog. In fact, you’re likely to find that lots of recipients don’t even open your newsletter. (Some may view it in preview mode and unless they click on something that doesn’t count as an open. But still, a low open rate indicates a problem.)
Mistina Picciano of 
Matt Cutts says Google’s not a huge fan. He says that sites which publish articles from article repositories tend not to be the highest quality sites, and there’s always the risk of duplicate content issues. He says that he would tend to “lean away from it” in preference to developing great content that can attract legitimate links itself, and promoting it with social media.
We all have them, but too few of us use them. Web Analytics, site logs, web site statistics … whatever you call them, they’re usually provided free of charge by our web hosting company. And if not, you can easily add free Google Analytics to your web site.