Don’t Hire a Marketer Until You’ve Asked this Question
Don’t Hire a Marketer Until You’ve Asked this Question
If the answer isn’t an enthusiastic “YES!”, think twice or even thrice before hiring that marketer.
For the first 90 days of this year, I’m each week posting the “single most important thing you need to know” about 13 essential aspects of sales and marketing, because “1 percent of activity creates 99 percent of success.” Here are my columns so far:
- The Single Most Essential Rule About Pricing
- The Best Sales and Networking Trick, Bar None
- The 10-Minute Website Tweak That Increases Sales
- How to Win Customer Loyalty in 10 Seconds
- The Essence of Market Targeting in 10 Short Words
- This Trick Triples Cold Email Response Rates
- The Secret Truth About Closing a Sale
In this column, I’m sharing something that can literally save a growing business hundreds of thousands of dollars–by ensuring that the people you hire to grow your business actually have the correct attitude that will make that possible.
The problem with hiring marketers is that the concept of marketing is so amorphous. Is it advertising? Branding? Customer requirements? Sales channels? Logo design? Trade shows? Brochures? Email blasts?
The easy answer is “all of that,” but the easy answer doesn’t provide you with a usable guideline for differentiating “good marketing” from “bad marketing.” While some elements (e.g. email blasts) are easily measurable, most of the rest are not.
Because it can be difficult to measure, a lot of marketing activity turns out to be pretty useless or even counterproductive. This is especially true in big firms (where marketing can be parasitic) but even startups often waste money on useless marketing tactics.
For example, I’ve seen startups tie themselves into knots worrying about their brand identity (name, logo, tag line) and so forth, long before they have any customers or even any products. That’s time and money wasted.
