Every business can benefit immensely from an effective Internet marketing strategy. Marketing online has great reach and is highly cost effective. In carrying out an online marketing campaign, you can choose to hire someone to carry out the task or take a Do-It-Yourself approach, DIY for short.
There are advantages and disadvantages to either of the approaches, and the disadvantages to the DIY approach may not be so easily apparent. Whilst on the surface it may seem, that you have a lot to gain in following the DIY Internet Marketing approach, it does have some hidden costs.
Before looking at the hidden costs of DIY Internet Marketing, it is a good idea to examine the advantages.
The most obvious advantage to this approach is cost. It is cheaper for you to carry out your own Internet Marketing campaigns, since you do not have to hire someone to carry out the activities associated with a marketing campaign, as you carry these out yourself.
It is possible to make extensive use of free resources, such as templates to construct a website or use free social media resources. Whether exclusively using these free resources is effective is another matter, but it does significantly lower the cost of conducting Internet Marketing campaigns by yourself.
Another advantage to the DIY approach, is that you hold more intimate knowledge of your product or service, as well as pertinent information about your customer base.
Sometimes, when using a third party to carry out your marketing campaigns, the details about product, service and customer base, can be miscommunicated. This does not happen when you run your own campaigns.
It is one thing to consider financial cost when looking at the cost of Internet Marketing, and quite another to consider the true cost. The true cost takes into consideration other hidden costs associated with not taking a particular action: the opportunity cost.
It may be cheap to Do It Yourself, but is it effective, and does it provide quality and validated results? These are some of the questions you need to answer when considering DIY Internet Marketing.
Running successful Internet Marketing campaigns takes time and experience. You have to learn the ropes in figuring out how things work and how to structure Internet Marketing campaigns that deliver positive results.
When you do it yourself, your lack of experience becomes a hidden cost that hampers the effectiveness of your Internet Marketing Campaigns. Even though it may be cheaper financially, you have to weigh this opportunity cost against the comparable cost of hiring someone experienced to carry out the campaign for you.
You will obviously get better at structuring your own Internet Marketing campaigns with time, but it may take a long time for you to be experienced enough, to be sufficiently proficient, and you might be better off hiring someone more experienced, or at least in the short term.
In order for you to become proficient at any task, you need to put in a lot of hours in order to gain sufficient experience to be effective. Assuming your area of specialisation is not Internet Marketing, this means that you will be working in an area you do not specialise in.
What this means, is that your lack of specialisation requires you to carry out the activity over an extended period of time, in order to gain the expertise and proficiency to be effective.
What it also means is that, you will have to sacrifice time or other activities, in order to be able to do this. Essentially, if you choose the DIY approach to Internet Marketing, this activity will take away valuable time you could be spending on other important activities in running your business.
Quality is a desired attribute in anything that we do, and Internet Marketing campaigns will be more successful if they are of high quality. When you choose to take the DIY approach to Internet Marketing, the initial quality of your campaigns is bound to be poor, due to lack of specialisation and lack of experience.
An experienced Internet Marketer, specialising in this activity, is bound to deliver better results than your DIY approach. They bring thousands of hours of specialised experience to a campaign, which you cannot match, due to your lack of experience.
Internet Marketing often requires that your business has a website and social profiles on social media platforms. The quality of these can vary widely, depending on who put these resources together. Whilst it may be cheaper to build a website yourself, or create your own social media profiles, the quality would be better, if someone with the necessary expertise does them.
Everything worthwhile takes time to perfect. If you are going to decide to use Internet Marketing to promote your products or services, chances are you have not done it before and have to start learning.
Learning to market online takes time. It has a steep learning curve. You have to figure out what to do and what not to do. You need to discover, often by trial and error, what works and what doesn’t.
The learning curve can be steeper if you are not working on multiple Internet Marketing campaigns at a time, which limits the depth of your experience. This is in sharp contrast to specialised marketers, who work on multiple marketing campaigns at once, and therefore have more exposure to real life situations.
Whilst it is financially attractive to conduct your own Internet Marketing campaigns, you should weigh your options and consider hiring someone who specialises in the activity, and has more experience.
Hiring an experienced and specialised Internet Marketer, lets you avoid the hidden costs of DIY Internet Marketing. It lets you avoid hidden costs associated with lack of experience and low specialisation, poor quality campaigns, as well as avoiding the associated steep learning curve and time constraints. At the same time, also consider that you may never learn, if you do not do it yourself.
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