If you have a small to medium-sized business, you may have noticed that your internal marketing team just isn’t holding up to the standards you foresaw, but it’s not because your internal team member isn’t trying, it’s because one person simply cannot be everything a small business needs.
In our 10th blogcast, Holding Internal Marketing Teams Accountable, Jessica and Kevin go into detail on what they’ve experienced when talking to a business with an internal marketing team. These businesses usually have less than 100 employees and there are a few sole problems that are repeatedly seen.
One of the major issues is that these businesses are spending a lot of money on people when they could be spending it on lead generation and if the team isn’t bringing in leads, then they aren’t really contributing to the bottom line of your business.
Another issue that comes up is that businesses don’t get the people they really need to make the marketing work. Someone who is skilled in strategy isn’t the best one to put it in place tactically, and someone who likes planning things out wouldn’t be the person you’d hire to write the copy of the campaign. And, if you are a small to mid-sized business, you may not even need someone to do these tasks all the time, so, having a team to work with for a specialist or a CMO occasionally would be the best bet in many situations.
No matter the case, what ends up happening is that the business owner will come out unhappy because they are falling short in some area of the marketing plan.
Businesses of this size also usually still have a strong central leader, who is typically the idea guy. But if you think about it, marketing is all ideas so you may end up with a leader who thinks they know what their customer wants and what they need and it becomes hard for the internal team to prioritize.
“Yea I had marketing, it was great for a couple of years.”
Or, does this sound like you?
The business who keeps a marketing person for a couple of years but after a few, they leave feeling like there isn’t much more they can contribute, or they simply burnout. You may have also started turning to them for bigger strategies that they don’t know how to do and as the owner you don’t know how to make that person grow or how to create a marketing career path to help them grow.
Regardless of the specifics of why your internal marketing team didn’t work out, many can agree that these challenges cause frustration despite your marketing efforts. Learn how you can hold your team accountable in this blogcast and then look out for our 11th Zig When They Zag blogcast, Common Marketing Myths Part 2.