Reasons Why Small Business Owners Don’t Hire Online Marketers
When it comes to small business online marketing, we often notice that many small business owners are reluctant to hire someone to help with their online marketing. Some outright refuse to do it. The main reason that small business online marketing doesn’t get more attention is that small businesses don’t often feel like they have the budget to allocate to it. However, it’s becoming increasingly more important for small businesses to market themselves online. In today’s marketplace you can’t afford not to do small business online marketing.
Whether you hire someone in-house or get an outside agency to do your small business online marketing, you must understand some things about online marketing.
1) Social media marketing is not entirely free. Even before paid advertising there was a time investment. Social media profiles are almost always free. Sending out social media posts is also free. However, you have to spend time crafting those social media posts. Time is worth money. If you hire someone to do this, they will charge you. If you want to do social media ads, which can be very beneficial to help get page likes, followers or post likes and shares, you also need to allocate some funds for that. Small businesses need to get out of the mindset that social media is entirely free. However, it is worth an investment every month because it’s still one of the best ways to be seen and known online.
2) Some small businesses have had bad experiences with online marketing or online marketers and they’re reluctant to deal with another person or agency. You can avoid a lot of problems by having a lengthy conversation with the person or agency you choose to go over your specific goals and timelines before any work is started. If you can get someone to give you feedback on what you need before they ask you to pay for it, then you can be sure that they know what they’re doing and that they can help you. You need a personalized solution for your small business online marketing. Even if your business is similar to another business, no two marketing strategies will be the same.
3) With small businesses there is a strong sense of ownership. The small business owner may not think that they can hand over something as important as small business online marketing to someone else. It may be hard to take advice from someone else, even a professional with a proven track record of success.
4) Small businesses may not understand the subtleties of online marketing. They may have unrealistic expectations and think that if, for example, you send out a thousand emails, then they will hundreds of orders almost immediately. It doesn’t work that way. Small business online marketing is a long term generally slow growth process.
Of course, there are many other reasons that small businesses refuse to hire someone to help with online marketing. The four reasons listed above are probably the most common. Can you cite other reasons?
