A cost effective approach to outsourcing digital marketing

Using a digital marketing firm is certainly an effective way to meet all the marketing needs of a growing tech venture. Many excellent firms that do a great job can be found in any given city.
The advantage of using a digital marketing firm is both the level and depth of expertise that they can offer their clients. A full service firm can create an integrated approach to all marketing efforts that pulls together social media, search optimization and marketing content development.
That being said, using a full service digital marketing firm is expensive. Many marketing firms shy away from working with start-up as the basic budget is often more than most bootstrapped businesses can afford.



Another approach is to strategically outsource selected components of digital marketing and do the rest in-house using off-the-shelf products, which is what we have chosen to do at Entrepreneurial Mind, LLC. Like so many other aspects of our business, we have chosen the route of bootstrapping for our marketing efforts.

Our Approach to Bootstrapping Digital Marketing
We spent a great deal of time working on our design. Our initial designer was a good friend of our daughter Maggie. She was a marketer/designer, who was building a freelance business. She worked with us to develop a design that reflected both my background as a professor and the image we all thought would work with young entrepreneurs. She developed our logo and our style guide, which we still use today. Unfortunately for us, she soon took a fulltime job and was unable to continue to work with us.

Our second designer was another friend of Maggie’s who also was building a freelance marketing/design business. He helped implement the designs we already had developed both in our website and at my blog. Once again, this designer ended up taking a fulltime job.
Our third designer is a student who is studying design. Again, she has been more than willing to work with us using what we already have developed. (Not all designers will do this – many want to start fresh with their own designs). She has been helping us implement our design plan into other materials we are beginning to offer to our members, such as checklists and eBooks.
In all we have spent no more than a few hundred dollars. Some of the work was done at no fee as part of us all helping each other out in our startups. Some was simply friends helping friends. Score one for bootstrapping!

We are doing all of our social media in-house. In addition to promoting our own materials, I identify helpful articles that we add to our messaging through social media. My wife pushes all of our social media out to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn using Hootsuite. As discussed in last week’s column, our partnership with Talkapolis is key to our video marketing materials and our Facebook campaigns. My daughter manages our email campaigns using Emma, which is a user-friendly and affordable email marketing platform for small businesses. Three more wins for bootstrapping!
Not all of our efforts at bootstrapping our digital marketing efforts have worked according to plan.
For example, we use landing pages to track which of our marketing efforts is driving potential customers to our site. We tried an off-the-shelf product for developing landing pages. Although it did what it said it would, it had three critical drawbacks. First, it was hard to integrate the landing pages with our email system. Although workable while we are small, it won’t scale with us now that we are growing. Second, it took a lot of time to set up each landing page. We plan to try a lot of experiments with our marketing, so we will be creating many landing pages. Third, the landing pages do not allow us to integrate with Google to allow us to interact with those who come to our site, but don’t leave their email.

We had to pay our developer to create a customized landing page template that meets all of our marketing needs. Score this a partial win for bootstrapping, as we will still be able to manage our own landing pages.
The next step in our digital marketing plans is to more actively use SEO to drive people directly to our site. We may or may not rely on bootstrapping for this. SEO is a tricky business, so we evaluate cost/effectiveness of taking a DIY approach versus outsourcing to a third party.


Sometimes Good Enough is Good Enough

Hiring a full service digital marketing firm, even with the most basic budget, would easily triple our current operating expenses. So we have chosen to, at least for now, continue to bootstrap our digital marketing.

Is our approach going to be as effective as it would be if we used a full service digital marketing firm? I highly doubt it! But in the world of self-funded, bootstrapped startups, sometimes good enough is good enough.

Our path is going to be slower and will undoubtedly have a more than a few unexpected detours, slowdowns and bumps in the road. But, we are absolutely convinced that with our willingness and commitment to learn, and with a lot of persistence, we will build our startup into a great business.

Source: Jeff Cornwall, Forbes