Hands up if you know how Hubspot works…. keep your hand up if you have the time to keep it humming along with the best marketing tactics and relevant content.
It would be great to be able to employ a marketing manager right? Well, maybe not. Often a business owner’s first response to problems is to employ someone, but when it comes to specialised, non-core, nevertheless critical functions it’s usually not the cheapest thing to do. Let alone the most efficient.
I’ll refrain from saying that putting on staff is old-fashioned but you know what I mean. The temptation to think that you would be paying for some other business to make a profit ignores the fact that your profit is impacted by overheads associated with employees.
The thing people often forget to take into account is what it costs to have someone sitting at a desk in an office – costs above and beyond their salary and direct on costs on-costs like leave and super. If you add up all the overheads of the business and divide it by the number of employees it’s usually around $5,000 per person per month. Some of these costs might be fixed in the medium term. Still, add it up and see what you get for your business.
This, of course, is before considering if the person you employ, to sit at a desk in your office, will be efficient across a range of tasks regardless of how hard they work.
The other option is to employ a specialised firm to manage it all. Within that firm, there will be teams of people with different specialised skills and, because they are working across multiple businesses, have better specialised-knowledge. And specialised firms can usually attract better quality staff. Marketing is a great example of this because it’s becoming increasingly complex.
This really dawned on me the other day when I was talking to a marketing firm just like this that charges $5,000 a month to manage it all. We agreed it was probably only after a business had employed a full-time marketing manager, one that maybe wasn’t so great, that they would see what good value that is. But even if your in-house marketing employee was brilliant, and I’m sure lovely, it’s still hard to justify the numbers if you look at it carefully.
In these times of increasing automation and AI obliterating a lot of jobs, the greatest need is for people that help us to choose and implement the best strategies. And then, ongoing, to keep them working efficiently.