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Key takeaways
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Paying someone each month to help with your marketing should result in one fairly obvious outcome. Your marketing gets done.
That sounds ridiculously simple for something I’m about to write an entire blog about, but the distinction matters.
I see businesses outsourcing part of their marketing while still carrying most of the responsibility themselves. They’re coming up with the ideas, deciding what needs to happen, sending reminders, briefing different suppliers, providing social media topics and asking whether somebody could please update that website page they mentioned three months ago.
They’ve outsourced some tasks, but they haven’t really outsourced the marketing.
If your goal is to get marketing off your plate, ongoing marketing support should include responsibility for moving it forward without you having to continually push it. You can read more about choosing the right marketing support for your business here.
So, what should that actually look like each month?
Someone should know what you’re trying to achieve
Monthly marketing shouldn’t start with the question, “What should we post this month?”
It should start much further back… and forward.
- What’s happening in the business?
- What are you trying to achieve?
- Which services or products need attention?
- Who are your ideal clients?
- What are they looking for?
- What opportunities are coming up?
- What has changed since the marketing plan was developed?
Your marketing activity should flow from those answers.
This is one of the reasons I’m wary of marketing retainers that are defined entirely by outputs.
Eight social media posts. One email. One blog.
That’s not how I charge.
My clients pay a monthly fee for me to manage their marketing, with the scope agreed around what their business needs and what I can realistically take responsibility for each month.
The work might include social media posts, email marketing, blogs, website updates, search visibility, campaign planning, supplier coordination and reporting. The exact mix depends on the business and its priorities.
The point isn’t to produce a fixed number of disconnected marketing pieces, it’s to make sure the right marketing work gets done.
A set number of deliverables might form part of the scope, but someone still needs to understand why they’re being created and what they’re supposed to achieve.
Otherwise you can become very consistent at producing marketing that isn’t particularly useful.
Planning should happen before the month gets busy
Proper ongoing marketing has some forward planning behind it.
That doesn’t mean developing a giant twelve month calendar and stubbornly following it regardless of what happens in the business.
Businesses and priorities change, and opportunities can pop up.
Someone suddenly remembers there’s a major event happening next month that apparently everybody knew about except the person doing the marketing. And, yes, that happens.
The plan needs enough structure to keep marketing consistent and enough flexibility to respond when something changes.
For my clients, that means looking ahead at what’s coming, deciding where our attention needs to go and making sure the marketing activity connects back to the wider business strategy.
It also means I’m thinking about what comes next before the current month disappears.
That alone removes a surprising amount of work from a business owner’s head.
Content should be part of it, rather than the whole thing
Content is usually one of the more visible parts of ongoing marketing.
Social media posts, blogs, newsletters, case studies, website copy, Google Business Profile updates and campaign content might all form part of the mix.
Good ongoing marketing should decide which of those make sense for your business rather than assuming you need all of them.
Your business might benefit from fortnightly blogs because search visibility is a priority. Another business may get much more value from regular email communication. A local service business might need more attention on its Google Business Profile and website service pages.
There isn’t a universal monthly content recipe, so be suspicious of anyone who claims there is.
Your website needs ongoing attention too
Websites have an annoying habit of being treated as a project you finish.
You launch it, admire it for approximately seventeen minutes, then everybody moves on.
Meanwhile services change, staff change, your positioning evolves, old information hangs around and pages that should exist somehow never get written.
An outsourced marketer should be keeping an eye on the website because it sits right in the middle of so much of your marketing.
That might mean updating existing copy, adding new pages, publishing articles, improving calls to action, identifying information gaps or working with your web developer when technical changes are needed.
Your website shouldn’t need a complete overhaul every few years simply because nobody touched it in between.
Search visibility needs ongoing work
Search has changed considerably, and appearing online now involves more than putting a focus phrase on a website page and hoping Google likes it.
Your website content, Google Business Profile, service information, location information, useful articles, authority and the way your business is described across the web all contribute to whether people can find and understand your business.
There’s also the growing influence of AI based search tools and AI generated search results.
That makes useful, specific and well structured information even more important.
Ongoing marketing management should therefore include thinking about how your business is being found when an ideal client goes looking for the service you provide.
Sometimes that will mean improving an existing page. Sometimes it means creating new content around the questions people are asking. And sometimes your Google Business Profile needs work.
Sometimes the answer is to simply leave something alone because it’s already doing its job. A slightly revolutionary marketing concept, apparently.
Campaigns still need someone to make them happen
Ongoing marketing shouldn’t mean repeating the same activity month after month.
There will be times when you want to promote a particular service, launch something new, support an event, enter a new market, respond to a seasonal opportunity or give an underperforming part of the business some attention.
That requires more than putting a different topic into the social media schedule.
Someone needs to think through the campaign, decide which marketing channels make sense, develop the messages, organise what needs to be created, coordinate timing and then follow through.
Without someone taking responsibility for that process, good campaign ideas have a remarkable ability to remain good campaign ideas. Usually in a meeting notebook.
Someone needs to coordinate the other people involved
Even when you outsource your marketing to one person or business, there’ll probably be other specialists involved from time to time.
A photographer or videographer. Perhaps a graphic designer, printer or signwriter. Maybe an advertising specialist or web developer.
You shouldn’t have to become the person coordinating all of them simply because the work falls under marketing.
Part of managing marketing properly is knowing when another specialist is needed, briefing them properly, (do not underestimate how important that is), making sure their work fits with everything else and keeping the project moving.
I regularly work with other specialists because pretending one person is brilliant at every part of marketing would be slightly ridiculous.
As a done for you marketing consultant, my job is to make sure the right work gets done by the right people.
Reporting should tell you something useful
Yes, marketing should be measured.
No, I don’t think that means sending a giant report filled with numbers and expecting a business owner to work out whether any of them matter.
Monthly reporting should help answer useful questions.
- What’s working?
- What has changed?
- Where are people finding you?
- Which content is being seen?
- Are enquiries coming from the marketing activity?
- Is there something we should do more of?
- Is there something we can stop doing?
Sometimes the answer won’t be available within a single month because marketing doesn’t operate according to reporting periods just because we’d find that convenient.
The point of measuring marketing is to make better decisions about what happens next.
You should be getting ideas without having to ask for them
One of the reasons you outsource to an experienced marketer is because they spend significantly more time thinking about marketing than you do.
And you should benefit from that.
They should be spotting opportunities, suggesting improvements, asking questions and bringing ideas to you.
You’ll still have input. Of course you will. Nobody outside your business knows everything happening inside it.
But there’s a big difference between being asked for input and being expected to provide the marketing ideas each month.
If your monthly email from your marketer says, “Can you please send through some ideas for this month’s posts?”, I’d be asking what exactly you’re paying them to manage.
Most importantly, somebody needs to do the work
Strategy, planning, and ideas matter. And then somebody has to sit down and actually do the work.
That might involve writing the article, scheduling the posts, updating the website, creating the email, briefing the designer, uploading the Google Business Profile post, checking the campaign, reviewing the data and following up with whoever is holding up the next piece.
This is where ongoing marketing often falls apart.
A strategy can be excellent and still achieve very little if nobody has responsibility for implementation.
For a time poor business owner, this is usually the bit they actually need help with.
You don’t need another person telling you what they should be doing. You just need someone making sure it all happens.
So what are you actually paying for each month?
The exact scope will be different for each business.
Proper outsourced marketing doesn’t mean one monthly fee should somehow cover every marketing activity your business could possibly need.
The scope should be agreed and responsibilities understood, with additional specialist work potentially outside it.
What matters is that you know who owns the agreed marketing work.
You should know that someone is planning ahead, watching what’s happening, creating what needs to be created, coordinating the moving pieces, measuring what’s useful and keeping marketing connected to your business.
And you should notice something else.
That you’re spending a lot less time thinking, “I really need to do some marketing.” because it’s already happening.
Want someone else to take responsibility for it?
That’s what Starfish is designed to do.
I work with established businesses that know marketing matters and have reached the point where they don’t want to keep managing it themselves.
We work out what your marketing needs to achieve, agree on the priorities and then I make the marketing happen.
If that’s the kind of support you’re looking for, get in touch and let’s talk about what ongoing marketing management could look like for your business.
What should outsourced marketing include?
Outsourced marketing can include marketing planning, social media, blogs, email marketing, website updates, search visibility, campaign management, reporting and coordination with other specialists. The exact mix should depend on your business goals, ideal clients and current priorities. Someone should also be responsible for deciding what needs attention and making sure the agreed work happens.
Can I outsource all of my business marketing?
Yes, much of a business’s marketing function can be outsourced, although the scope will depend on the provider and your business. Your outsourced marketer might manage strategy, planning and day to day implementation while coordinating specialists such as web developers, designers, photographers or advertising professionals when their skills are needed. Your business still provides important information and input, while responsibility for managing the agreed marketing activity sits with the marketer.
What should I expect from an outsourced marketing manager each month?
You should expect them to understand what’s happening in your business, plan upcoming marketing activity, complete the agreed work, coordinate other suppliers where required and review useful performance information. They should also bring ideas and recommendations to you rather than relying on you to decide what marketing needs to happen each month.
