1. How do you know if you need to improve your marketing game?
When growth becomes stagnant and sales slowly begin to decrease, this is when it’s time for your business to be shaken up. You hit a certain threshold where you can only grow so much.
You can combat slowed growth by upping your marketing game. Whether it’s researching ways to reach new audiences, creating new product offerings, building referral programs, focusing on new platforms, you need to refresh your growth in the marketplace.
2. Where do you get marketing training to improve your skills?
Today, there are a ton of self-paced marketing training courses available online for you to take advantage of. A quick google search will give you an endless list of resources. Here’s a list of a few of the big players:
LinkedIn Learning
Udemy
Coursera
DigitalMarketer
Hubspot Inbound Certification
Hootsuite Social Media Marketing Certification
3. Should I hire a marketing manager for my small business or do the work myself?
Marketing your business is a full-time job. As a business owner, it’s rare that you have enough time to learn different marketing techniques and understand how to implement them well on each platform.
If you want your campaigns to produce results, your marketing needs constant attention and consistent effort. Writing a random blog post every couple of months, sending a one-off email promoting a new product, or following a content calendar sometimes—isn’t going to cut it.
Having a dedicated marketing manager is the only way you’ll be able to give your marketing constant attention and consistent effort it needs to flourish.
4. What does a marketing manager do?
A Marketing Manager helps with daily marketing activities and initiatives of a company.
They work on building brand awareness, managing social media, planning and implementing marketing campaigns, creating content for SEO and traffic growth, tracking and analyzing performance data, and the list goes on.
5. What skills do you need to look for in a Marketing Manager?
- Creativity—they’re creative. They use out-of-the-box thinking to ideate and develop strategies on how to drive growth for your business.
- Writing—they’ll be responsible for creating a lot of content. It’s imperative they understand how to write for audiences in a way that captures their attention and connects with them on a deeper level.
- Research—they’re investigators. They need solid research skills to keep up with new trends in the industry as it relates to your business’ target audience.
- Omnichannel and social savvy—they’re a versatile marketer. They understand that the customer journey isn’t linear. They should know how to implement marketing tactics and strategies across all marketing channels: email, social, paid, SEO, and content.
- Critical thinking—they’re inquisitive and analytical. They should be able to understand and leverage data to guide marketing decisions and the overall strategy.
- Project management—they’re a project management pro. They should know how to juggle and manage multiple projects and initiatives at once.
6. What’s the difference between a Digital Marketing Manager vs. a Consultant?
A Marketing Manager handles routine things like writing content for your blog, creating social posts, getting reviews for your business, managing your communities, public relations, working on referral programs, and more depending on your industry.
A Marketing Consultant helps you with the strategic component like the marketing action plan, the operations of the plan, the analysis of results, and ensuring you remain on track on working towards your big goals. They can help you with high-level strategy, things like defining your ideal client, crafting core messages that set you apart, sharpening your brand identity, optimizing your website, or building your blog.
7. What’s better: owning marketing internally or hiring someone externally to do my marketing for me
When you hire outside marketing help, you're renting an expert's time. It's temporary. No matter what you're seeking help with—SEO, paid advertising, website optimization, full service, you name it—the engagement eventually comes to an end. Then, you're sent right back to square one trying to do one of two things: figure it out on your own or hire marketing help externally temporarily once again.
There are parts of marketing that need to be internally owned and developed. When an outside consultant or advisor is your entire marketing department, you can only reach a certain level of growth. However, that's not to say you don't need to work with a marketing consultant. There’s a sweet spot where ‘owning’ and ‘renting’ work magically together, hand in hand.
8. Is there a program that will train someone to run and market my business for me?
One of the major reasons small business owners don't hire internal marketers is because they don’t know how to train the right person, how to get someone up to speed successfully, or what they should even be working on and when.
We’ve created an innovative, hybrid coaching model for businesses who need to level up their marketing with an internal resource or team but either don’t know how to do it or know that they would benefit from an outside resource helping them build a complete marketing system, structure, and plan – with their internal marketing resources. It’s called the Certified Marketing Manager program.
9. How does the Certified Marketing Manager program work?
The Certified Marketing Manager Program takes the burden of training right out of your hands. Our consultant will do the training and leveling up of your in-house marketer for you and give you the confidence that what needs to be done is getting done. We'll train your people while you grow your business
The consultant creates your marketing action plan and acts as your strategic advisor while they help you develop the marketing skills and knowledge of your team.
10. What makes the Certified Marketing Manager program different from just another online course?
The Certified Marketing Manager Program is not a course. We've taken the very marketing system that has now been installed in thousands of small businesses and turned it into a hybrid coaching and training program designed to help any business accomplish two very important things:
- Build a custom marketing action plan
- Hire, train and develop their internal marketing team
The program comes with an experienced consultant armed with a proven marketing system and a personalized training program based on your business for your marketing team (even if that’s just one person). Our consultant will teach your team how to build, run, and implement a custom marketing system tuned to evolve as you grow.