How to Hire Marketing Help for your Local Business

One of the biggest challenges that local business owners face is balancing the need to market their business with the pressures of running it. If you need some social media strategies for your business, or want to know how crowdfunding can actually help market your business, we’ve got you covered, but in this blog post, we’ll walk you through your options on how to hire a marketing professional for your business.

Why you should consider hiring a marketing professional for your locally-owned business

Let’s face it - sometimes there are things that it’s just better to hire someone else to do when running an independent business. Here are some reasons why you might consider hiring a marketing professional for your business as it grows:

• You’re looking for a more polished look for your business’ marketing collateral (website, social media, photography)

• You’d rather spend time focusing on other facets of your business, like operations and strategy - hiring marketing help frees up your resources

• You want to get your business in front of different audiences but don’t know how

• You’re thinking about a big move - like opening up a new location, entering a new market, or running an investment offering

Understand your marketing needs

As a local business owner, you might have an idea of what marketing your business is already doing. You’ve probably got a couple of social media accounts, maybe you advertise in local papers, and if you’re really sophisticated maybe you’re using Meta or Google Ads to spread the word about your business.

If you’re doing all of this yourself, you also know how labor-intensive it can be! When you’ve got other priorities, like, running your business, it might be the time to find someone else to run your marketing. But first you need to know what your marketing strengths and weaknesses are, and what you need help with from a professional.

Now is the time to determine your goals for marketing - do you want to increase sales? Expand into new markets? Target a different segment of the population? Do you want more public relations involved in your business?

What does a marketing professional do for your local business?

Well, this is often going to depend on your marketing needs as we discussed above, but most marketing professionals are going to have these skills to various extents. When you have an idea of what you need for marketing your business, you can look for agencies or freelancers (or in-house marketing personnel) who specialize in what you need.

• SEO - getting your online content seen by people using search engines (like Google)

• Graphic Design - have professional-looking logos and designs

• Web Development - get your website nice and pretty and functional

• Photography - no one wants blurry photos of their food on their social media!

• Social Media Marketing - gain and maintain followers and engagement on social media

• Email Marketing - build your email list, write a newsletter, and gauge engagement

• Content Marketing - anything that requires copywriting - your website, social media, blog, emails, etc.

• Digital Marketing - creates paid ad campaigns, SEO, etc.

Often, you’ll be able to find marketers with a combination of these skills, so if you find someone with the perfect suite of skills for your business, all the better!

Hire in-house help or outsource it?

When you’re hiring marketing help for your local business, you have essentially two options to start with. Do you hire someone to work exclusively with your business as your in-house marketing team, or do you outsource it?

Having in-house personnel is great if your business is constantly changing. You want someone intimately familiar with your business and your product, and who knows how to communicate it to the public. If you prefer a more hands-on approach to your marketing, having someone in-house might be a good idea, because there’s an easier line of communication. However, hiring in-house marketing personnel is often quite expensive, and might be even more so than the retainer for an agency or a freelancer.

If you hire an agency or a freelancer, it’ll most likely be a bit less expensive than hiring your own in-house help, but you probably won’t be their only client. That’s okay, especially if your business is pretty consistent, and you mostly need someone behind the scenes making sure people are seeing your business. Usually, you’ll work closely with this kind of marketing professional in the beginning as you familiarize them with your brand and your strategy, then it’s a little more hands-off from there.

It’s also worth noting that if you choose an agency, you can find one that specializes in your industry! For example, in the food industry there are agencies like Oyster Sunday, or Grapevine Local Food Marketing. Try searching for industry-specific agencies to strengthen your business’s marketing strategy.

Is it time to hire a marketing professional for your business? We can help fund it!

Small businesses seeking to grow their business’s marketing capabilities from Tubby’s Taste to Guidance Whiskey have used their Honeycomb investment offerings to help fund that growth. Learn more about running a Honeycomb investment offering by filling out the form below.