Digital Marketing: Do-It-Yourself vs. Do-It-for-Me

Before we get started, let’s take a look at a few numbers:

• In 2019, the average internet user had at least seven social media accounts.
• 97% of US adults under the age of 65 are on social media at least once a month. The majority spend time on social media every day.
• Social media is the preferred mode of customer care. That’s how your clients want you to interact with them.
• 22% of the world’s population is on Facebook. Also worth noting that 76% of Facebookers and 51% of Instagrammers are on their preferred social media account daily.
• Globally, there are 4.66 billion active internet users.

These numbers are staggering! No wonder digital marketing is fast on the rise. In fact, it kinda feels like a failure to use digital marketing is a huge miss.

But why is it so important for business? Should you go it alone, or get someone to do it for you? Crucial questions. Let’s get some answers.

Why is digital marketing important for your business?

Okay it’s obvious – with digital marketing, you unlock a huge new market to sell your product and/or service. But it’s deeper than that. There are far more benefits to using digital marketing, such as:

• Reaching customers where they spend their time and money. Take another look at the numbers – it’s easy to see why advertising on the internet and social media makes sense.
• Leveling the playing field for small businesses. Digital marketing allows smaller businesses to hold a top-ranking position on search engines and compete with retail giants.
• Targeting your audience. It allows you to segment your audience and create marketing content that’s extremely relevant to your target market, which ultimately results in more leads and more revenue.
• The best return on investment. Email marketing, for example, has a return on investment of 3800%, while content marketing can generate three times the leads for about 62% less than traditional marketing. Likewise, companies that use social media for marketing outsell 78% of businesses who don’t.

These are just some of the benefits, but it should be enough to give you an idea of why digital marketing is vital for your business.

What’s Do-It-Yourself vs. Do-It-for-Me?

Do-it-yourself means you manage your digital presence on your own. You’re hands-on with online customer interaction, online ads, email marketing, and everything else that encompasses your digital marketing efforts.

Do-it-for-me means you entrust your digital marketing to an agency who handles your online reputation management. It’s entirely hands-off, so it’s a good option if you have a busy schedule or don’t know much about digital marketing.

Do-It-Yourself vs Do-It-For-Me: Which Is Better?

Let’s look at the pros and cons.

The pros of a do-it-yourself approach:

• You’re always in control. You always know what’s going on with your marketing, return on investment. You know what’s working and what’s not.
• You learn something new. Because you’re doing it yourself, you’re forced to learn new technologies, new tools, and new marketing strategies.
• You won’t get bored. Marketing evolves constantly, so you need to follow it closely and keep learning as each new trend emerges.

The cons of a do-it-yourself approach:

• It takes time to develop and implement an efficient, effective digital marketing strategy, so you’ll have less time to spend on running your business.
• You’ll always have doubts. Because you’re not an expert, you’ll always suspect your marketing isn’t the best that it could be.
• It can be overwhelming. There’s a lot to learn, and just when you think you’re on top of it, something changes and you need to re-learn it all. Over time, this can become too much.

The pros of hiring an agency:

• You can spend your time focusing on running your business instead of learning about marketing and technology.
• You can review multiple agencies to choose the one that best aligns with your business goals and requirements.
• You’ll have endless marketing advice. Agencies are staffed with experts who know what works and what doesn’t.

The cons of hiring an agency:

• They’ll never think like you, write like you, or present themselves like you, so it can often be difficult to find an agency that portrays your brand the way you want.
• Because the agency is doing all the marketing, you lose some control over the processes and the voice of the business won’t be purely in your hands.
• Agencies can be expensive. Though you’ll save a lot of time which you can then spend on running your business.

That’s a lot of pros and cons to sift through. While hiring an agency can be more expensive, and you’ll lose some control over the marketing process, the trade-offs a huge as you’ll save a lot of time, and you’ll be investing in quality marketing efforts right out of the gate.

It’s kind of like this: would you rather bring your medical concerns to a doctor, or perform surgery on yourself? Hire a lawyer to make a claim on your behalf, or go it alone?

You hire experts for everything else. It makes sense to hire an expert for your marketing.

1. https://www.lyfemarketing.com/blog/importance-of-digital-marketing/
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/
3. https://velocifoxdigital.com/diy-digital-marketing-vs-hiring-an-expert/
4. http://blog.collabagency.com.au/digital-marketing-pros-and-cons-of-diy-vs-agency