Why You Need to Let Go When it Comes to Marketing and Design
I always tell my clients not to spend their time trying to design their own marketing materials. Unless you are a designer or a marketing professional, your time is not best spent trying to perform – or tightly monitor – these activities.
It can be difficult to let go and allow your marketing and design team to take the reins, but if you don’t, it can drain resources better spent focusing on your business, create frustration for you and your team, and produce inferior results in the end.
Letting go and giving your marketing team the power to interpret your messaging for your clients and create freely can be a scary step, however.
So, how – and when – can you let go?
The answer to that will depend on your business situation and the hierarchy of your organizational structure, but mostly, it will depend on how well you/your business and your marketing and design team work together.
The best way to develop the rapport needed for your creative marketing team to function as a well-oiled (and possibly highly caffeinated) part of your organization is to communicate. Before embarking on marketing projects, discuss your goals, provide your input, and allow your marketing team to listen, digest, and prepare.
During your initial discussions, both you and your potential marketing team will begin to determine if it’s the right fit.
You can start off with an initial project to get the ball rolling and build from there. With the right people in place on your marketing team, you’ll be ready to hand over the reins so that your involvement in their daily operations is reduced to providing feedback and approvals rather than monitoring or participating in every move they make.
This not only gives you your time and energy back, but creates the possibility for better marketing messaging and materials and allows your marketing team to really provide the value that you hired them for in the first place.
Without that communication, direction, and freedom to do what they do, your marketing team’s ability to provide you with the value of their expertise can be severely diminished. You won’t get your money’s worth, you won’t free your time, and your marketing product and endeavors will suffer.
It’s not you, it’s me…or is it?
If you find that you can’t get to the stage of letting go, take a step back and determine if it’s the right fit. If not, try to determine why it’s not working before you sever ties. If it’s due to the marketing team’s lack of progress, involvement, or inability to grasp your vision, it might be time to try another resource. If it’s due to lack of communication, confusion, or (even inadvertent) micromanagement on your end, it might be time to reevaluate your mindset so you can get back on track and focus on your business.
Marketing may not be what your business offers as a service to clients, but marketing is always what your business should be doing. It cannot be seen as an afterthought if you plan to move your business into the future.
When you have the right fit and are able to let go, your creative marketing team can provide great value in helping you promote and develop your business moving forward.
Happy marketing!
Kristian