If you’re not working with us right now, that’s cool. There are plenty of decent agencies out there, and we hope you find the right one for you. However, you should definitely check to see if they only employ experts in science, psychology, and digital marketing automation.
And if you’re not working with any lead generation experts right now, that’s your choice, and we respect it – it’s your business after all! You should get to decide where to allocate your hard-earned capital.
However, we’d recommend against setting up and running your own website and ad accounts unless you’re an expert in advertising, consumer psychology, copywriting, or design (otherwise, you’re almost certainly going to lose money).
We know this because some of our team even have first-hand experience in building and selling successful businesses.
But being the person in charge of running a business isn’t easy.
It doesn’t matter if you’re in year one or year ten – there are always difficult decisions to be made.
Among the hardest is knowing where to cut costs.
But, walking away from lead generation services is a gamble. And it usually starts a series of events that looks something like this*:
*Maybe you have a huge personal following right now (tens or hundreds of thousands of engaged and enthusiastic followers) on one or more of your personal social channels. If that’s the case, it’s going to be much less awful for you to reach month 12.
Months 1 – 3
- Your website is getting less than 50 visitors per month.
- You pour your focus into posting daily on social media.
- A few of your posts get encouraging engagement, but most of those likes are from friends and family. Still, you’re adding a few followers to your account, so that has to mean something. Right?
- You haven’t added many new customers to your client list, but that’s ok. These things take time…
- You decide to start blogging.
Months 3-6
- Engagement on social media has dropped off, and your website traffic hasn’t increased. In fact, it’s trending down.
- The bills seem to be piling up – you wish your electricity company could understand that you’re trying to get a business off the ground here. This stuff takes time.
- If you’re paying rent, things start to seem more stressful than usual.
- You decide to boost one of your more popular social media posts for a week. It was a photo of you smiling into the camera. You’re not sure how much to spend, but $100 should be enough to get a few customers.
- Setting up that ad took hours – it’s so confusing!
- No leads from your boosted post.
- You try again with another post, this time $200.
- No leads from your boosted post.
- You don’t have time to sit down and write blog posts anymore. There was no point anyway; your top post has less than 100 views.
- You decide that word of mouth is the best way to grow, so you get out into the community and start shaking some hands.
- Much of your time is now taken up by creating (low-performing) content, looking for events near you, attending events around your city, and following up with possible leads you met there.
- You’re spread very thin and have little time to think or strategize.
- Your personal life is suffering.
- You’re desperate to make this business succeed but feel more stressed than you did in your old sucky job.
- Your enthusiasm is rapidly decreasing.
Months 6-12
- It’s almost tax season, so you need to get your documents together. There are a lot of bills there – although not too many for marketing, so that’s a big saving.
- Your P&L shows a couple of income events, but otherwise, every month shows a pretty heavy loss. There’s been no ‘hockey stick’ moment when it comes to your revenue – how do all those entrepreneurs you read about do it?!
- You start to worry: “Can I afford to keep doing this?”
- Running a business suddenly feels scary rather than exciting.
- You start to question your life decisions: “Do I really have the appetite to keep doing this?”
- You decide that maybe you’re not meant to be an entrepreneur, and it’s time to stop dreaming and get a 9-5 job or drop this side hustle business once and for all.
- You feel hurt, a little embarrassed, and maybe even cheated by all those entrepreneurship gurus who told you this would be your golden ticket.
We see this time and again, and it makes us die a little inside just the same every time.
The reason it hurts is that it’s all *so avoidable* for entrepreneurs with a good product or service (like yours).
All you need to do to avoid this suffering is to know when to stop and say:
“Enough is enough.”
Because as soon as you utter those words, you know it’s time to start investing in your digital marketing again, letting experts find and bring you leads so you can run the business you’ve always dreamed of.
So, Before You Start Down The Same Path, Ask Yourself
What is the point at which I should start investing in a digital marketing agency again?
I implore you to get a pen, or open your notes app and write down a trigger moment – do it right now – it could be:
- The feeling of panic when you receive a bill in the mail.
- The tenth time you say to your kids, ‘I don’t have time tonight’.
- The moment you realize this business isn’t exciting to you anymore.
If you recognize your trigger moment when it happens, you know when it’s time to change course and think about outsourcing to experts again.
In doing so, you might just be saving your business from disaster.
And if you’re reading this as a former client of Optimized Marketing, we’d love to work with you again and save you all of the pain described above (that’s why we keep a backup of your site available). Also, if you do switch back, you’ll inadvertently cause a chain reaction of virtual high-fives across our expert (and officially very happy) remote team.
And everybody likes that.
To always having a strategy in place.
