Making a Marketer (Not a Murderer): Finding a Marketing Best Friend

It’s no easy feat to find a marketer for your business. There are so many marketing agencies and marketing specialists out there, all with a unique set of credentials and skills that makes it so hard to pick just one.

So, how do you decide on your new marketing best friend?

What to Look for in a Marketing Bestie

Here are the top five things to look for when choosing your next marketer.

You absolutely need a marketer who possesses the skills required to meet your marketing needs. That means you’ll need to have a clear idea of what it is you need and want to achieve through marketing before choosing your marketer.

After all, you wouldn't hire an SEO specialist when you're in need of some high-quality content creation. So, you have to know what you need your marketing to achieve before you start your search to find a marketer.

Your marketer will need clear guidelines to work within on the project, including why you need them, what they’re expected to do, and the project’s budget. All of this can be established in a contract or scope of work document, but you need to be sure they can clearly reciprocate that communication.

However, setting those crystal-clear expectations is only possible when you know exactly why you need a marketer. Simply recognizing that you need increased revenue or need someone to run ads isn’t enough of a direction for your marketer.

You and your marketer will need to sit down, likely for two or three calls, to establish what your business needs and what the marketer is going to do to meet your needs.

The project timelines need to be clearly outlined from the start. You can’t achieve your goals when you aren’t working towards the same goals and deadlines.

Once you know that, you can focus on the outcomes. This is the start of the final stretch where you and your marketer finalize timelines for each and every objective. This process will wrap up with your marketer pitching ideas about how to reach those objectives.

Marketing your business costs money and having someone else do it for you means you are selecting an expert or experts. With that comes inherent costs, so before you start looking for a marketer you’ll need to figure out how much you’re able to invest into the project.

Once you know how much you can afford to pay a marketer and still have some leftover to pay for the project’s expenses, you can start actively looking for a marketer whose rate fits within your budget (and also has the skills needed for your project to succeed).

Setting a budget for your marketer doesn’t mean that you have to commit to hiring them on a full-time basis. Based on the size of your project you will have to decide whether to bring them on part-time or as a contractor and pay them an agreed-upon rate. 

The most important thing is that you consider how the marketer’s pay will impact their output and what impact that will have on your business.

Clashing personalities don’t make for great project success, nor does it fit the mold for a marketing best friend. You’ll need to learn about your marketer’s personality before deciding to bring them on, which you can figure out from real-time conversations. If it matches yours, they’ll likely be a good fit for your team.

That’s not to say you need to find a marketer who agrees with everything you say, or vice versa. Instead, you should both be open to discussing the project or points of contention. You can learn a lot from your marketer — after all, they’re an expert — and your marketer won’t want to work on the project completely alone (and if they do, you should probably get a different one).

Conclusion

Now that you know what to look for in a marketing best friend, you’re ready to get started on making your life better. That’s what best friends are for, right?