There’s a stage in business where doing your own marketing makes complete sense.
You’re building the business, watching every dollar, figuring out what works and doing 147 different jobs because, well, somebody has to.
It all falls to you.
So you write the posts. Send the emails. Update LinkedIn. Take the photos. Attempt the occasional Reel. Remember you have a blog. Forget you have a blog. Remember again three months later.
It works. Until it doesn’t.
Because at some point, the business grows up - but the way you manage your marketing doesn’t necessarily grow with it.
You CAN do it. That's not really the issue.
Most of the business owners I work with are perfectly capable of doing their own marketing.
They know their business better than anyone. They have ideas. They understand their customers. And after years in business, they’ve usually picked up a fairly decent understanding of marketing along the way too.
The problem is finding the time and headspace to actually do it consistently.
A good friend of mine said to me while she was in the process of launching her business: “I’m building an HR business, because I want to do HR. I didn’t start an HR business to become an expert in marketing”
And she’s right.
Marketing gets fitted around client work, meetings, staff, accounts, family, emails and whatever unexpected thing has landed on your desk that particular Tuesday.
So it happens in bursts.
You have a productive afternoon and schedule three weeks of posts.
You send two emails and promise yourself you’ll keep doing them fortnightly.
You write a great blog… and then don’t tell anyone it exists.
Then business gets busy again and marketing quietly slides back down the list.
Sound familiar?
Your business might have outgrown this way of working
There comes a point where marketing needs to stop being one of the “little jobs” you do yourself and instead become a genuine function of the business.
And I think a lot of established business owners miss that point. Not because they don’t value marketing, but because they’ve always done it themselves, so why outsource it now?
The problem is that your time is worth more now.
An hour you spend fiddling around in Canva, scheduling posts or trying to remember how to format your latest email or use Pinterest correctly is an hour you’re not spending with clients, developing the business, leading your team or doing the work that actually requires you.
That doesn’t mean you should have nothing to do with your marketing.
Quite the opposite.
Your knowledge, opinions, stories and expertise are what make the marketing worth paying attention to.
But you don’t necessarily need to be the person turning all of that into posts, Pins, emails and content every week.
There are usually signs
One of the biggest is that your actual business is far better than your online presence makes it look.
You’ve built a successful business. You do excellent work. Clients recommend you.
But someone discovering you online for the first time wouldn’t necessarily know any of that.
Your last post was three weeks ago. Your emails are sporadic. There are great testimonials sitting somewhere waiting to be used. You have photos nobody has posted and ideas you've been meaning to turn into content for six months.
Another clue?
You’re constantly thinking about marketing without actually getting much of it done.
It becomes one more open loop in your head:
I really need to post something
We should send an email.
I need to do something with those photos.
I should really look at Pinterest.
That mental load counts too.
Outsourcing your marketing doesn't mean you disappear from your marketing
Good outsourced marketing shouldn't remove you from your marketing.
It should remove the workload while keeping the things that make the content yours.
We still need your expertise.
We need to know what you're seeing in your industry, what clients are asking, what you're working on, what you believe and what you want the business to be known for.
But you shouldn't necessarily have to turn every one of those thoughts into a finished piece of content yourself.
That's where having the right marketing support changes things.
Someone else can see the client's question and think, there are three posts in that. They can take the blog you wrote and turn it into content across multiple platforms, and they can make sure your email actually goes out.
They can keep things moving when you're having one of those weeks where marketing would otherwise be the first thing to disappear.
The questions isn't if you CAN do it
You probably can. Actually, I’m SURE you can. After all, you've been doing it for years.
The better question might be:
Is doing all of your own marketing still the best use of your time?
Because once you've built an established business, marketing shouldn't depend entirely on whether you happen to have enough time and brainpower left over at the end of the week.
It deserves a proper place in your business.
And sometimes recognising that is simply another sign that your business has grown.