Why do excellent internet marketers work for others?
If you can sell anything through marketing, why not start a business of your own?
There’s a common misconception that marketers are necessarily entrepreneurs, can build excellent products, and are willing to work crazy hours on areas that are unrelated to marketing.
Some of the best marketers I know work for marketing agencies or large corporations. They manage teams, craft strategy plans, create funnels and make sure KPIs are in place.
Listen in and find out more about a marketer’s journey once you step into entrepreneurship.
If you are a marketer working a full-time job, what’s the reason you don’t work solo?
Highlights
00:01:10 – Marketing Covers A Broad Scope
00:02:13 – A Great Marketer Can’t Be Great at All Things Equally
00:04:08 – Working For A Company vs Actually Starting A Company
00:04:55 – Marketing Requires Practical Experience
00:05:45 – Managing A Business Can Lead to Losing Core Expertise
00:08:08 – Founding A Company Is Not Always The Best Option
Transcript
Hey guys, Mario Peshev from DevriX.
Today’s question is, if a digital marketer is really that great, how come they haven’t created a company of themselves? Or, how haven’t they launched entrepreneurship, or something, doing for kind of themselves? Of course, the follow up question is, are there any great digital marketers working for any companies out there? Because, again, if you can market, and sell your product, why don’t you start your own product, right?
The thing is, I’ve heard that question numerous times, and the problem is that some of those questions come from people who have worked with marketing
Marketing Covers A Broad Scope
First off, marketing is a pretty broad, has a pretty broad scope of areas that it kind of covers within the broad niche digital marketing. Some of those are search engine optimization, social media marketing, copywriting, email marketing, affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, PPC, and so on, and so on, and so on. It’s a broad scope. Expecting someone to understand all of that in the best possible manner is unrealistic.
I do, I’m going to take a kind of a separate topic as an example, like, for example, I always say that there’s no such thing as a WordPress expert, because WordPress is so broad, and there’s so many things you can do in WordPress, but you can’t be a WordPress expert.
You can be a power user, you can be a theme developer, a plugin developer, or just a back end developer on WordPress, you can be a translator, you can be a support guy. Whatever it is, you can’t be an expert. It’s, nobody says, “I’m an internet expert.” An expert on what?
A Great Marketer Can’t Be Great at All Things Equally
Back to the idea of marketing, like there are very few people who are really brilliant in all things digital marketing, and most of those have been on the market for like 20 years doing only that, or heading incredibly large teams, have different experts reporting to them, and explaining like every single test that they have done, why has it failed, and so on, and so. It’s hardly realistic that a great marketer can be great at all things equally.
Same goes for everyone else out there.
Like there’s a, in development there’s a term called full stack developer, and it’s true that a lot of people can comfortably solve problems in different areas, but they usually have a specific area they’re great at, or two, three and then, they can solve the standard problems in most other kind of sub areas.
Same goes for digital marketing. For example, a great writer is supposed to understand SEO very well, probably really good at social media marketing, but that doesn’t mean that they understand PPC very well, and email marketing, and so on. Like there’s specific nit picky details that are important, and that really makes the difference at the end of the day, and that’s really important to understand.
Some of those great marketers are just great marketers in their specific corresponding niches like sub topics, specific things that they’re supposed to do. That doesn’t mean that they can do everything else, and in order to sell something, like unless they want to be a consultant type, just selling what they do, they need to provide a kind of wider retainer package offering several different things, but that’s not really the most important thing.
The most important thing is actually the type of work that a digital marketer would do as a founder of a company. What’s the difference between working for a company, and actually starting a company?
Working For A Company vs Actually Starting A Company
When you work for a company, you’re not starting from scratch. You already have an existing business, with a proven business model, with a proven brand, with a specific budget that you work on. There’s some traction. There are other people.
There’s the senior management that can possibly help with something. There are existing clients that you can [inaudible 00:04:35] kind of refined for the target audience. There’s an established set of marketing process. There are campaigns that are working, and you can revise, and some that they have failed. Like, a lot of the groundwork has already been laid out before you have even started with a marketing activity in a company.
Marketing Requires Practical Experience
And, even if you’re a great like, the reason is, the thing is that’s why marketing requires some practical experience either company, or like entrepreneurship for a few years for yourself in order to actually start selling services, because you need to understand the best practices, you need to learn the ropes of the business, and everything else related to actually running a kind of marketing consultancy, or any other type of firm as a marketing kind of founder. That’s one thing.
Even great marketers don’t always want to start from scratch, because if they start from scratch even if they’re great, they’re going to need two, three, four, five years in order to generate some decent revenue, and steer around a company with say 20, 30, 40, 50 people.
Managing A Business Can Lead to Losing Core Expertise
On the other hand, they can become a marketing director at Goldman Sachs, or I’m just, that’s a random name actually – like it’s any large company looking for great marketers. You’re going to have access to hundreds, or even thousands of people working on different campaigns,
On top of that, the entire concept of running a business doesn’t revolve around marketing alone. You’re either going to sell services, or a product. With services you do have to do the work yourself, but you still start as a consultant, and that’s not really scalable.
In order to scale you need to work a lot, and then, find people, and then, train a number of those people. Make sure they will properly handle legal accounting, and so on, and so on, and so on. With product it’s kind of similar. You still have to end up like doing product development, and probably find technical people building the actual product, then hiring support people, and then, again, ensuring that payroll is being handled on time, pretty much everything else.
Like a business owner over the first couple of years, or three years is probably spending 30, 40 up to 50% of their time on the actual business activities. Like that percentage is dropping, by business activities, I mean, their core expertise. That percentage is dropping every few months, every six months, every year simply because you keep growing, you keep scaling, and you need to start doing things that are slightly different, or more different.
Again, you need to do hiring, product planning, customer support, accounting, legal activities, project management, networking, customer relationship, sales funnels, building processes, a lot of other things that are kind of the role of a CEO, or the CEO has to hire someone, and still spend the time with them to establish the best practices, or revise certain processes, reiterate on something that has already been kind of agreed on.
Founding A Company Is Not Always The Best Option
In a nutshell founding a company is not always the best possible option for a great digital marketer, and a lot of great companies have a lot of great digital marketers who simply don’t care about starting a company on their own. They may like the 9:00 to 5:00 style, and working with a great team, a good office, steady paycheck, probably some commission’s, or campaigns, or bonus based system, but they can still be an incredibly good digital marketer without founding their own company.
And, still you can imagine that great marketers who are also entrepreneurial usually don’t have a hard time starting a business, because they know the concept of what people need, how to package that in a way that makes people buy from them, and then, the rest is just building really the product offering.
If they have a great idea, if they’re able to gather brilliant idea from interacting with customers over time, that’s kind of one of the best ways to bootstrap a product, but still, it’s a lot of hard work, takes a lot of time, money is negligible over the first years, you’re probably going to run [inaudible 00:09:20] actually.
With that in mind, most people simply don’t wanna deal with that in the first place. They’re fine getting a decent paycheck, working in a good company, testing campaigns where a lot of money, in a company that owns a lot of money, and basically taking it from there.
