If you’re a homeowner, you know how much of an investment yard upkeep is. It’s not just time, either—you’ll spend a fair amount on lawn and garden equipment, treatments and applications, and various materials. At the end of the day, it’s often worth paying someone else to do it! Not only will the costs balance out in the end, a local lawn care expert is likely to achieve better results. After all, they know what they’re doing!
If you’re a small business owner, this same concept applies to your marketing. You can pay to hire an in-house team—Content Director, Digital Strategist, Graphic Designer, Marketing Analyst, etc.—and do it all yourself. Or, you could outsource to an expert: someone who might achieve better results with the same budget (or less).
- Listen
Augmenting in-house expertise
Maybe you already have an in-house Digital Strategist or a Content Director who knows their stuff. Given the choice to build out a staff around them or outsource, take a moment to consider how to best-help them. Do you want them to delegate or collaborate?
Building a marketing department also means building leadership hierarchy into the mix. Who manages who, and in what capacity? Regardless of the structure, this takes time away from your in-house experts. If they’re delegating, they’re not collaborating. However, if you give them a partner that doesn’t need supervision and oversight, you’re putting your experts in a position to do what they do best.
Remember, fractional teams are elastic. Already have in-house SEO expertise? Leverage that into the content strategy developed by a partner firm. Have in-house designers and copywriters? Let them create collateral while your partner handles orchestration and execution. Outsourcing should be synonymous with augmenting. Let the lawn care expert handle your grass while you apply your green thumb to a picturesque flower garden. The results will complement each other perfectly.
Marketing partner > Marketing department
Some homeowners absolutely love waking up early on Saturday morning, firing up the lawn mower, and spending hours manicuring their lawn. If you’re like us, you’d much rather sleep in, watch some cartoons, and relax knowing that you’re paying someone else to do it for you—with better results. Small business owners can achieve this same peace of mind in trusting their marketing to an outsourced partner.
If you’re looking at your marketing efforts and feel a sense of urgency to do more, JXM would love to chat. Our combined marketing expertise is at your disposal. Let us show you the value in working with a vested marketing partner, as opposed to going through the trouble of building out your own marketing department. We promise the grass is greener on our side.
This is where small business owners face a conflation of concepts. Every small business needs marketing to grow, but not everyone needs a marketing department. Fractional marketing—like the services offered by JXM—exists to bridge these concepts, to help small businesses get the marketing they need, without encumbering them with staff they’re not prepared to use.
Overcoming misconceptions about outsourced marketing
We’ll come right out and say it: very few small businesses (<$25MM) need a marketing department. Can they afford it? Yes. Will it produce results? Sure. Can a fractional team do the same thing? Likely. Yet, when it comes time to market, many growing businesses don’t think twice about hiring in-house vs. outsourcing. Why? As a firm that offers fractional marketing services, we’ve heard no shortage of misconceptions.
- “An outside firm doesn’t have the familiarity with our business or our brand.”
- “We don’t want to pay for marketing services that we’re just not going to use.”
- “We need the data transparency that comes with handling marketing in-house.”
- “Our budget isn’t structured to deal with variable costs month-over-month.”
The list goes on—and, unfortunately, they’re all rooted in misconceptions about what it means to engage an outside marketing firm. The fact is, brands are still in the driver’s seat when they seek a marketing partner. You’re not relinquishing ownership of your marketing: you’re tapping into the expertise of a readymade marketing team who can handle it in a results-driven capacity.
In other words, it’s still your house; you’re just hiring a lawn care expert to make your landscape the envy of the neighborhood.
The capacity to market more efficiently
Working with a fractional marketing team gives small businesses the capacity to tailor their growth trajectory. Beyond delegating time-consuming marketing tasks, partnering with a firm like JXM means getting insights into the marketing activities that actually provide value—and the strategies that might not be worth your investment. This level of hands-on oversight has far-reaching benefits: from bottom-line cost savings to better exposure across more lucrative channels.
Outsourced marketing teams also have a key advantage over in-house marketing departments: objectivity. Approaching the brand and its efforts from an external perspective puts the onus on fractional teams to learn the most effective ways to reach target audiences. There’s no “usual” or “general” approach. There’s no data bias. There’s no reliance on assumptions that may (or may not) prove true.
At JXM, we’re compelled to prove our value by learning everything we can about our partners: their brand, goals, expectations, audience, efforts, etc. This leads to a fundamental understanding that we can apply to core marketing strategies. Mode and means; form and function. We put two and two together for more efficient marketing that yields results. There’s no need to research the best fertilizer blend when you can call an expert to come out, assess your lawn, and make sure it gets exactly the nourishment it needs.
Transcending the transactional
Success isn’t quantified through contracts
