Your Marketing Person Cannot Read Your Mind

There are many things I can figure out about a business.

I can look at your website, analytics, social media, competitors, reviews, search presence, and existing marketing. I can research your industry, identify gaps, build a strategy, and probably find at least three things on your website that need updating.

What I cannot do is know that a customer said something really interesting at 2:15 yesterday afternoon unless somebody tells me.

This is one of the less obvious parts of outsourcing marketing.

Hiring someone should take work off your plate. But outsourcing the marketing doesn't mean completely disconnecting marketing from the business.

The better connected those two things are, the better the marketing usually becomes.

The best content is often hiding inside the business.

A customer asks a great question. Someone leaves a fantastic review. A product sells out. An employee reaches a milestone. A client sends an email describing exactly why they loved working with you. Your team solves an unusual problem. You change a process.

From inside the business, these are just things that happened Tuesday.

From a marketing perspective, some of them are incredibly useful.

But if your marketing person isn't standing next to you when the conversation happens, they need a way to hear about it.

Sometimes it is literally a text that says, “Customers keep asking about this lately. Might be worth a post.”

Perfect.

Now I know.

Information is different from instructions.

If you hire a marketing professional, you should not have to provide a daily list of exactly what to create.

What I find most useful isn't necessarily a list of instructions. It's information. Tell me what's happening. Tell me what customers are talking about. Tell me what the team is excited about. Tell me something isn't working. Tell me you have a new idea.

Then let me think about what we should do with it.

Maybe it's a social post. Maybe it belongs in an email. Maybe it needs a website update. Maybe it should become a blog. Maybe it's actually an operational problem and marketing it would be the wrong response entirely.

The calendar is particularly bad at reading minds.

We can plan a month beautifully. Then the month actually starts.

Something changes.

A content calendar should never be so rigid that a genuinely important thing happening inside the business can't get onto it.

But somebody needs to tell the calendar.

If your business receives a major award and nobody tells the person managing social media, Thursday's scheduled evergreen post may still publish.

Not because your marketer doesn't care.

Because we do not receive psychic notifications when trophies enter the building.

I have checked.

Access matters too.

You can hire the best marketing person in the world and make their job almost impossible if they cannot get what they need.

The website login lives with someone who left two years ago. Nobody knows who owns the domain. The verification code goes to a phone in a drawer. The high-resolution logo is on a computer last used in 2019.

I wish I were exaggerating.

Otherwise, an astonishing amount of marketing time gets spent on digital archaeology.

Your marketing person should also be asking questions.

Communication goes both ways.

A strong marketing relationship requires curiosity about the business itself.

Marketing should not operate in a separate universe.

Outsourcing should reduce your workload, not your involvement.

Those aren't contradictory ideas.

Think of it less like handing someone a sealed box labeled MARKETING and more like adding someone to the flow of useful information around the business.

Tell us what's happening. Give us access. Answer the questions we can't answer ourselves. Share the weird customer comment. Send the photo. Forward the testimonial.

And then let us do something useful with it.

Because I can do a lot with information.

I just need the information first.

Still working on the mind-reading.