Why fast-growing companies need a marketing specialist
Some business owners may think that they don’t need to invest in marketing if their company is already growing quickly. However, when demand is rapidly increasing, marketing can become even more important. With the right strategy, you can use marketing to shape long-term success.
After undertaking foundational steps, such as company formations, many businesses initially manage marketing in-house. Usually, this means the founder or non-specialist employees carry out marketing activities. However, once a business reaches a certain size, it will typically benefit from a marketing specialist.
In this article, 1st Formations will outline some of the reasons why fast-growing companies should consider hiring a marketing specialist. If your business is expanding quickly, bringing in a marketing expert could help you deal with certain growth-related challenges.
Growing your business multiplies marketing decisions
When you found a company, you might begin by using your preferred channel to sell your goods or services. However, while you’re growing your business, you’ll likely expand to new platforms to keep reaching customers in their preferred places. Each new channel, campaign, and audience adds more marketing decisions. For a busy founder or overstretched small team, this can lead to poorer choices and missed opportunities.
One of the reasons growing companies may struggle without a specialist is that a lack of leadership can lead to making decisions in isolation. For example, one team member might look after Facebook while another updates the website. This disjointed approach can lead to mixed messaging, which then confuses customers. Specialists can build strategies and guidelines to keep everything consistent across a company as it expands.
It’s also important to remember that marketing should complement the wider business. A marketing specialist can prioritise decisions based on impact, timing, and staffing levels. If you run a restaurant that is fully booked on weekends, there is little use promoting your Saturday night menu. By bringing a marketing specialist into your business and advising them on your priority areas, they can help you craft a campaign to bring in more midweek diners.
Fast-growing companies don’t necessarily need more marketing, but they can benefit from smarter strategies that optimise time and resources.
Growth exposes gaps between marketing effort and business goals
As a business grows, it’s not unusual for there to be misalignment between its marketing and business goals.
For example, a new business owner might set themselves a goal of posting a certain amount on social media. That might be effective for building a profile when first starting. However, the content won’t necessarily support a growing business in achieving its bigger goals.
As priorities shift while growing your business, new goals emerge, such as increased revenue targets or expansion into new markets. Marketing activity can sometimes drift from these goals without expert guidance. A marketing specialist can help align day-to-day promotional activity with the business’s wider growth plan.
Expansion increases the cost of inefficient marketing
Marketing mistakes can be costly. And the bigger the business, the greater the financial risk. It’s often more financially sensible to pay out extra for a marketing specialist than waste time and advertising spend on inefficient tactics.
As a small business with a minimal marketing budget, inefficiency is typically manageable. While every penny still counts, small businesses can often afford to take a chance on a marketing trend because they can only lose so much. However, as budgets expand, so does the risk of what they could lose.
Often, growing companies scale their spend before they scale their strategy, which can lead to businesses wasting their marketing budget. Small inefficiencies may compound as activity expands. It’s important to assess what type of marketing is working before spending more money on it. A marketing specialist can support here by auditing existing outputs and advising where to focus future efforts.
Growing companies need clearer internal ownership of marketing
As a company grows, an unstructured approach to marketing becomes unsustainable. Typically, marketing is more effective when owned by one person or a dedicated team, rather than everyone doing a little bit of marketing.
Unclear ownership over marketing can lead to several issues:
- Duplication– Several people might complete the same task without realising somebody else has already done it. You only need one summer sale banner, but you might end up with two if there is no leader, which wastes company resources.
- Inconsistency– Individuals have their own personal preferences, which may inform how they create marketing assets. A marketing specialist can define guidelines that everyone needs to follow. They can also oversee content creation to make sure everything aligns.
- Delays – A lack of marketing ownership can cause tasks to be put on the back burner, meaning timely talking points might be missed. If nobody has the responsibility of creating a seasonal newsletter, the moment may pass by the time somebody thinks to do it.
Having a marketing specialist can help a company become more accountable for its marketing efforts. When somebody takes the lead on marketing, everyone has a better idea of what they need to do and the reasons why they’re doing it.
Marketing specialists can advise on scalable approaches
There’s a significant difference between creating short-term wins and having a scalable marketing strategy. Although quick wins can be useful early on, they don’t always support long-term growth. Heavily marketing trending products might bring in new business temporarily, but it’s important for companies to also have promotional foundations that support scalability.
A marketing specialist can help businesses balance short-term needs with longer-term momentum. For example, they can advise companies on how to join trending conversations in ways that stay true to the overarching brand. They can also help businesses build up an audience based on their core offerings, so that companies don’t need to keep chasing trends to hit sales targets.
Growth increases the need for evidence-based decisions
Growth forces company founders to make more higher-stakes decisions – faster. Having a marketing specialist who can provide clear insights can make it easier for business owners to make data-backed decisions with confidence and speed.
A lack of insight into existing marketing efforts can create uncertainty. It’s hard for founders to know which areas to focus on without an understanding of its effectiveness. However, a marketing specialist will look at every campaign holistically. They can then provide leaders with the clarity they need to support better planning and forecasting.
Many businesses look at marketing as execution-only. However, it’s important to also use insights to inform strategic decisions. The performance of campaigns can tell you a lot about what your customers like and the things they don’t.
Why hiring a marketing specialist is part of growing a business
Marketing doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s an important part of a business’s growth journey, but it’s a part that is sometimes wrongly overlooked.
As fast-growing companies undergo structural changes like new hires, operational adjustments and policy formalisation, it’s a good idea for business owners to consider how their marketing will grow with them. Having a marketing specialist can bring some clarity to this area.
In a similar way to how organisations such as 1st Formations handle company registration compliance and reduce the hours founders spend on administrative tasks, a marketing specialist can help those in growing companies redirect time elsewhere.
