Should you do your own marketing?

When you should do it yourself

If your budget is under roughly €500 a month in ad spend, management fees will consume most of the value and you would be better learning the basics yourself.

If you enjoy it, have the time, and your market is small enough to be covered by one campaign, there is no mystery here that you cannot learn in a few months.

• —Ad budget under about €500 a month
• —You have genuine time and some interest
• —One service, one small area
• —Your main problem is that the website is bad — fix that first
• —You are testing whether demand exists at all

When you should not

If you are the person who does the work, marketing gets done at eleven at night or not at all, and the 'not at all' usually wins during the busy months. That inconsistency costs more than a fee.

Also if you have several services and areas, if you are spending enough that a percentage improvement exceeds the fee, or if you have tried twice and it did not work.

The middle option nobody offers

Pay someone to set it up properly and hand it over. The set-up is where most of the expertise sits; the ongoing running of a small, stable campaign is not difficult.

Plenty of businesses are best served this way and very few agencies will suggest it, because it is a one-off fee rather than a retainer.

What to fix before hiring anyone

If the website is slow, the phone goes unanswered, or you have no reviews, an agency will spend your first three months' fee on problems you could have fixed yourself for nothing.

Any agency worth hiring will tell you this before taking the money. If they do not, that is the answer to whether to hire them.

The honest summary

Marketing is not complicated, it is just relentless. What you are actually buying is that somebody does it every week whether or not you had a bad Tuesday.

If you will genuinely do it yourself every week, do it yourself. Most people will not, and being honest about that is the whole decision.