When fitting the website, social media, content and campaigns around the day job stops working, your business might have outgrown DIY marketing and reached the marketing gap.
When you first start a business, doing your own marketing makes sense. You update the website. Put something on Facebook. Make a quick graphic. Send the occasional email. Perhaps someone else in the business lends a hand when things get busy.
For a time it seems to work.
But businesses grow. There are more customers to look after, more enquiries to answer, more staff to manage and more opportunities to pursue. Things that once fitted into a spare hour are squeezed out by the work of running the business itself.
Even though it's really important marketing starts slipping down the list, because everything else is really important too. It's really starting to look as if you've outgrown DIY marketing.
Welcome to the marketing gap
There's a stage many growing businesses reach where they've become too established to rely on DIY marketing, but aren't ready to employ an in-house marketing team.
We call it the marketing gap.
You know your business needs regular marketing. You probably have plenty of ideas about what you'd like to do. What you're missing is the time, capacity or specialist skills to keep making it happen.
Sound familiar?
Here are some of the signs.
1. Your website is full of things you've been meaning to change
A new service needs adding. Some photographs are out of date. There's an offer that finished months ago. A page could explain what you do much better.
None of the changes are big jobs, but that's also why they never quite reach the top of the list. Over time, dozens of little jobs add up to a website that no longer represents the business you've become.
2. Your social media happens in bursts
You post regularly for a couple of weeks. Then work gets busy. Three weeks later somebody notices nothing has gone out, so there's another burst of activity before the cycle starts again.
The problem usually isn't a shortage of things to talk about. Growing businesses generate great stories all the time—completed projects, customer questions, new products, expertise, successes and useful advice.
Someone simply has to turn them into content. That someone used to be you, and now you're too busy.
3. Marketing belongs to whoever happens to have five minutes
Perhaps the business owner updates the website. Someone in the office makes the occasional Canva graphic. A member of the sales team posts on LinkedIn. Another person sends an email when there's something important to announce.
Everybody helps, but nobody really owns it. The result can be fragmented marketing that looks and sounds slightly different every time something goes out ...when it actually does go out.
4. Good ideas aren't becoming finished marketing
You know you should follow up past customers. You'd like to promote a particular service. There's a case study you could write, an email campaign worth sending, a brochure that needs refreshing or an idea for improving the website.
Having ideas isn't the problem. Getting from “we should do that” to “that's done” is.
5. Marketing keeps becoming an emergency
Suddenly you need an advert by Friday. There's an exhibition next week and the stand artwork isn't ready. A salesperson needs a new brochure. A new service has launched but nobody has updated the website.
When nobody has ongoing responsibility for marketing, perfectly predictable requirements have a habit of becoming urgent ones.
6. You're spending your own time doing work somebody else could do better
Business owners are used to wearing several hats. But as a business develops, your time becomes increasingly valuable.
An evening spent wrestling with a website, designing a leaflet or wondering what to post on social media is an evening you're not spending on customers, staff, sales, operations or the next stage of the business.
Doing something yourself isn't always the most cost effective way to get it done.
7. You need regular marketing help, but not a full-time employee
This is perhaps the clearest sign of all that you've outgrown DIY marketing. There's enough marketing work to need proper attention, but not enough to justify recruiting a full-time designer, web developer, content writer and marketing specialist.
And even if you employed one marketing person, you'd be expecting them to cover a very broad range of skills.
That's the gap.
You don't necessarily need a marketing employee
You may simply need access to a marketing team. For established small businesses, an ongoing relationship with an external marketing partner can provide the middle ground. Someone who gets to know your business, your customers, your brand and your goals so that the relationship doesn't restart from scratch every time you need something.
Website improvements can sit alongside social media, graphic design, email campaigns, content, advertising and the dozens of smaller marketing jobs that appear during the year.
Some months one area needs more attention. Other months, priorities change. That's normal. The important thing is that somebody reliable is there to keep things moving.
From occasional projects to ongoing progress
At DigitalArena, we work across web, branding, design, content and marketing.
For some clients that means a specific project. For others, it means becoming the marketing resource they can call on throughout the year — taking care of regular work, responding when something new comes up and helping decide what should happen next.
It's particularly useful for growing businesses that have reached the point where marketing needs more attention than they can give it themselves.
Has your business reached the marketing gap?
If you've outgrown DIY marketing, the jobs are piling up but an in-house department isn't the answer, let's talk about what ongoing support could look like for your business.
TLDR
Growing businesses often reach a point where DIY marketing stops working. The website gets neglected, social media becomes inconsistent, good ideas stay unfinished and marketing jobs keep turning into last-minute emergencies. That doesn’t always mean hiring a full-time marketer, it may simply mean bringing in ongoing external support from a team that knows your business and can keep your website, content, design and campaigns moving forward.
DIY, DWY or DFY?
At DigitalArena we want you to succeed online, and this can be achieved in several ways.
- DIY: You can Do It Yourself, as many small businesses and startups try to do at the beginning while they get going.
- DWY: We can Do it With You, by providing support, instructions, brand logo design, in areas your business needs help with, while you carry out the majority of the activity yourself.
- DFY: Or, we can Do it For You as a full service, offering as many or as few of our areas of expertise as you like on retainer or project by project.
To find out more, please call us on 01530 452276 or email support@digitalarena.co.uk.
