If you are just starting your journey into marketing your business, or have been trying a variety of marketing methods for some time, it is inevitable that you will come across industry jargon that requires a Google search. BVA, CAN-SPAM, CTA, CTR, PPC, SEO, ESP, SERP, and many others get thrown around during sales presentations to make the marketer look smart, often at the expense of the customer. In an attempt to demystify some of these terms and help business owners gain an understanding of the fundamentals of marketing their business – we want to take you back to the basics and explain what the heck is marketing and why it matters.

Marketing Solutions Have Changed

Marketing has changed over the years, not just because of online communities and expanding technical growth but because humans have changed. Now more than ever, consumers have control over the information they choose to receive (especially with Google’s My Ad Center rolling out in late 2022). Gone are the days when you had untrackable advertising platforms when marketing campaign results were measured years after their inception.

In today’s post-pandemic marketplace, your customers have hundreds, if not thousands of different options to choose from. Their opinions and preferences are purchasable in disaggregated user/target consumer profiles that are then sold to marketing agencies, media buyers, and anyone else looking to talk directly to YOU.

Because if the product is free, then YOU are the product.

Let’s look at how the very definition of marketing has changed over the last 20-ish years.

The Definition of Marketing (1995 via the American Marketing Association’s OG website marketingpower.com which no longer exists): “Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives.”(1)

The Definition of Marketing (approved in 2017 and found at www.ama.org ): “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”(2)

Which definition resonates most with you and your view of marketing? Is it missing something? Comment below and let us know your thoughts about these definitions.

The Changing Landscape of the Marketing Industry

Marketers and business owners must navigate many challenges in today’s competitive landscape: the planned obsolescence of advertising cookies, the rise of influencer marketing, data privacy laws such as GDPR, and bot-filled social media platforms. It can be head-spinning to try to understand such complications and continue to offer a quality service to your customers.

This is often the initial reason for hiring someone to do your business’s marketing.

Hiring a Marketing Agency

The best-case scenario is to hire a tried-and-true marketing agency, but for many small business owners, the annual marketing budget starting point is often too high to consider. Even though finding a starting price range varies greatly based on your business’s size and industry, the truth is many agencies won’t give you the time of day if your budget is under $50,000. Some agencies will list their client’s investment range, to better identify their target customers, with budgets of $250,000 to over $1,000,000 being the norm.

Hire an Internal Marketing Employee

Your next plausible options are to hire someone internally, do the marketing yourself, or hire boutique agencies/freelancers for specific marketing initiatives such as SEO (search engine optimization), digital marketing, traditional media buys (think cable TV and your local newspaper) and PPC (pay-per-click) advertising placement. If you hire someone on a W2 basis your business’s marketing will only be as good as your hire’s overall knowledge and understanding of how to market a business. On top of a potentially limited scope of marketing skills, your new W2’s actions and efforts are seen as your business’s actions and efforts. Any errors, negative perceptions, or copyright infringements land on the shoulders of your business and its liability policy. Every year over 3,000 trademark infringement lawsuits are filed in US district courts. The average litigation case can range from $375K to $2M depending on a number of factors such as damage to brand equity and potential revenue loss. (3) This doesn’t even touch on the many unknown FTC rules and regulations, which vary depending on which industry you work in and who you market to. This fear can often lead business owners to be heavy-handed when it comes to marketing their business, and we all know how problematic micro-managers can be. It is even becoming popular to add disclaimers to posts that are not sponsored by companies, as there are strict rules around how individuals can promote products and services for money. (Disclaimer: all links within this article were cultivated to provide additional resources, information, or context to the topics this post discusses. No in-kind or financial incentives/exchanges were made by any of the entities linked within this article.)

Doing the Marketing Yourself

While this is definitely a viable option, we bet that you didn’t get a degree in marketing/communications, nor do you spend hours a week reading the latest marketing trends, legal and regulation changes, and case studies from top global marketing firms. You started your business to provide a service or create and distribute a product – not to learn how to tell people about why they should purchase/use what your business provides.

Hiring Freelancers/Consultants/Boutique Agencies

As it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village to raise a business. Many business owners can tap into their local community networks to find auxiliary business services to help them grow their business – such as their city’s local chamber, Small Business Development Corporation (SBDC), or background/activity-based group (minority-owned, the neighborhood pickleball court, or the PTA meeting you wish had been an email). When hiring through a personal network’s reputation, “gut feelings’” are usually the determining factors for who to hire to do the marketing for your business. Some professional networks have a professional vetting process to help ensure that their members are providing quality services.

Freelancers:

Online platforms such as Upwork or Fiver ostensibly incentivize their talent pool to compete on price, especially when they take a 13% cut of transactions made through their platform. Remember the “Cheap, Fast, and Good” rule of thumb in life – you can only pick two. The logo that costs you $20 online may not serve your business as it grows or may commit a number of designer faux pas.

Consultants:

Consultants can come with a higher price tag and usually specialize in a specific field/area of marketing. Usually, consultants specialize in a few areas or are only called in when the 💩 has hit the preverbal fan. If you are focusing on only one or two areas of marketing for your business like organic content and SEO, then a consultant may be the right fit for you.

Boutique Agency:

If you are lucky you may find a boutique marketing agency that fits your company’s vision that can be flexible with tight budgets. One does have to wonder how much of your services are being white labeled (freelancers the agency hires for areas they can’t cover with their internal team). With the lack of transparency in white-labeling products or services, it can become confusing how many extra fees you may be paying for the contracted marketing services provided. While, people and project management are skills that agencies should be compensated fairly for, mark-ups on deliverables (publishable content for your business) and advertising media buys (online ads, billboards, radio spots, etc.) can be anywhere from 3% to 15% of the media buy. This means that if you spend $1000 on a media buy between $30 to $150 of that spend is going to the agency proctoring the buy – this is often the reason why agencies often don’t work with businesses with marketing budgets under $50,000. They need to make their business margins and, sadly small businesses are not always very lucrative.

The Challenge we saw with Small Business Marketing

We saw that small businesses with lower budgets were in between a rock and a hard place.

Do it yourself and work through any mistakes that occur OR take a gamble and hire someone you hope knows what they’re doing and is putting the interests of the business first. Or, or, or… There are multiple solutions to this challenge and oftentimes it greatly depends on who is in your network and how much you trust them.

This problem is why Sword and Spark was founded.

We don’t want to do all of your marketing – we want to fight for your business to receive quality marketing that focuses on the tried and true fundamentals of business marketing. We help businesses by vetting quality freelancers, consultants, and boutique marketing agencies; providing website SEO-focused auditing services; company-specific market research, and individualized marketing strategy roadmaps. Our core mission is to educate our clients on marketing products and services what marketing best practices are and how to create a proactive marketing strategy positioned for business growth. The professionals within our networks all have prior agency or client-side experience and we welcome you to talk directly with them to avoid miscommunications throughout the process of investing in your company’s marketing initiatives.

Sword and Spark’s Mission

Educate – Through blogs, newsletters, connection opportunities, Q&A sessions, blog topic requests, community, etc.

Connect – Get locally recommended contacts for industry professionals who can work directly with you instead of a middle person.

Fight – Have a fishy feeling about who you are working with now? Call us in and we’ll help you solve the worst-case scenarios of being locked into a contract that isn’t serving your needs and redirect wayward thinking/assumptions to help get things back on track in our best-case scenarios.

We do our best not to have a minimum annual budget criterion. In fact, if you just want to have us look over and consult you on someone else’s proposed plans to market your business – we are happy to do that.

Need questions specific to your business or industry answered or want to learn how to work with us?

Our first 20-minute consultation is free and can be scheduled here.

To Summarize…

In all truth, we just want to sit down with you and talk about your goals. Then we work together to create a roadmap on what are some next steps – this could be creating a website, researching your target customer, or refocusing your brand image. What happens next is up to you. You can take that roadmap and hire people from your own network or we can provide a non-white labeled list of industry experts we recommend. Our consultants are always happy to come back at any time to evaluate any challenges that may have come up or help realign the team to the targets we had identified together.

We can’t wait to help you uncover the potential that a targeted marketing strategy can provide.

Schedule your free consultation today!

Sources:

1: Marketingpower.com. AMA PDX. (2012, September 13). Retrieved from https://ama-pdx.org/marketingpower-com/

2: Definitions of marketing. American Marketing Association. (2022, March 31). Retrieved from https://www.ama.org/the-definition-of-marketing-what-is-marketing/

3: Ertekin, L., Sorescu, A., & Houston, M. B. (2018, September 12). Hands off my brand! the financial consequences of protecting brands through trademark infringement lawsuits. American Marketing Association. Retrieved from https://www.ama.org/2018/09/12/hands-off-my-brand-the-financial-consequences-of-protecting-brands-through-trademark-infringement-lawsuits/