3 Results You Can’t Get From DIY Marketing and Advertising Campaigns

The world is filled with DIY opportunities that will save you money and help you learn new skills.

One search on YouTube, and you’ll find an array of DIY instructions for just about anything. Marketing and advertising, however, aren’t suitable for DIY projects.

Marketing and advertising are professions you can only master by learning from experienced industry professionals.

Sure, you can learn how to create an email marketing list, copy sales page templates, and perform basic SEO. All of those tasks are easy to learn. However, performing tasks in isolation isn’t effective.

All marketing tasks need to be created as part of an overall strategy that incorporates all marketing channels. If you’re performing tasks that aren’t directly connected to defined marketing goals, your DIY approach will fall short of the results you deserve.

Here’s a list of 3 critically important results you’ll get from a professional marketing campaign that you can’t easily attain with a DIY approach.

1. Measurable and sustainable increases in ROI

The whole marketing point is to increase your bottom line and maintain an upward trajectory. If you want measurable increases in ROI, you need professional marketing services. Doing your own marketing might generate sales, but sales won’t necessarily translate to a sustainable increase in ROI.

You can’t possibly learn all the skills you need at a high enough level to truly manage your own marketing campaign. For instance, you’d need to master the following skills:

• Email marketing
• Copywriting
• Content writing
• Website development
• Search engine optimization
• Video marketing
• Marketing psychology

You can certainly learn how to perform the above as a set of tasks, but to be effective in each area requires expertise. For example, copywriting and content writing aren’t the same skill and marketing psychology takes years to master.

2. Targeted, hot leads

Placing a web form on your website to capture leads is easy. However, the questions you ask will ultimately determine the quality of your information.

If you’re generating traffic from PPC ads, your PPC strategy will also contribute to the quality of your leads. The way you set up automatic lead segmentation in your CRM software will also affect lead quality.

If you want hot leads ready to buy, your web form needs to be designed with marketing psychology in mind. Form questions should disqualify and qualify leads simultaneously and should not ask for any unnecessary information.

For example, say you’re selling a proprietary healing device to licensed medical professionals. You don’t want to ask a yes or no question like, “are you a medical professional?” Many people will choose “yes,” and you’ll think you have more hot leads than you really have.

Your form should ask what specific medical license they possess with a drop-down list of standard medical licenses and a selection for “other.”

Webform questions are just one aspect of marketing that requires a professional with experience to formulate effectively. You can collect leads with a DIY strategy, but you won’t get the targeted leads you need.

3. Accurate reporting and data

To get results, you need to know where you are in relationship to your goals. That requires plenty of data.

Running pre-made reports in your marketing software control panels isn’t going to tell you everything you need to know. Information pulled from reports isn’t straightforward.

For example, if you log into your CRM and see that your latest email has a 14% open rate, you might think that your email subject lines aren’t good enough and people ignore your messages. That might be true for some of your leads, but a marketing expert would consider the following factors:

• Did the email get sent to your entire list, including all segments?
• Are all of your leads segmented and therefore included in the email blast? Or did some leads slip through the cracks and end up in the database with no assigned segment?
• Are your leads stale?
• Have you been in regular communication?
• Were your leads gathered from relevant, targeted sources?
• Did you add people to your database from another email list?

Your leads may not recognize the source of your email.

If all you know are marketing tasks, you’ll start split testing subject lines to pinpoint the source of your low open rate. If your leads are simply stale or untargeted, split testing would be a waste of your time.

A professional marketing team will get you results

Marketing professionals can think beyond what’s in front of them. They see the bigger picture and know how everything fits together. If you’re struggling with a DIY marketing approach, consider hiring a professional. You’ll get better results, and it will be well worth the monetary investment.