With so many ways to market your business, it can be hard to master all marketing outlets. Unfortunately, all this power and choice causes all sorts of problems due to the incredible complexity and the inability to really focus. As a small business owner, what do you choose?
With the many options, you may suffer from “paralysis by analysis” because since you have so many things you could be doing, nothing gets done.
Worse, you may be constantly worried that your competition is doing so much better than you are, and understands everything they need to know about digital marketing. They seem to show up when people search for the services you also provide.

How do you even know where to start? So what is the solution to this dilemma and complexity of choice?

Solution 1: Become an expert in digital marketing

You could spend all of your time trying to learn how to be an expert Facebook marketer, how to be an expert with reputation management, how to build the best customer relationship management software you can possibly can, how to do search engine optimization within Google, etc.
You could conceivably become an expert in all those things but is it not easy to do. Where do you have the time, when are you able to focus on it? After all, you have your own business to run!
It’s not that it’s impossible to learn it all, but it takes time and an investment that most small business owners don’t have. After all, they are busy trying to grow their own business services!
The other annoying thing is about digital marketing is that it changes regularly, and is often hard to keep up with.
You shouldn’t have to take the time and effort to learn the complexity of digital marketing, especially if it detracts from your own business.

Solution 2: Hire somebody

Since digital marketing can be complex, a lot of small business owners don’t really know what questions to ask. This makes it more difficult to evaluate people and what kind of a job they say they are going to do.
As there really is no certification or definition of who constitutes a “digital marketer,” there are a lot of really bad actors out there. You’re probably getting bombarded by calls and emails by people vowing to do your “SEO” for you and “rank you #1 on Google.”
You don’t know these people, and you don’t know exactly what techniques they are going to do to market your business online. On top of that, they could charge you $5,000 or more for their services, and you won’t exactly know how well that $5,000 is spent.

Solution 3: Hybrid 80/20 rule with hiring a digital marketing expert

The final solution is a hybrid solution. That is, figure out what to focus on, and apply the 80/20 rule (aka the “Pareto Principle”).
The concept of this is that 20% of what you need to focus on will give you 80% of the reward.
Let’s learn a little bit about what this 20% is. With this quick foundation of knowledge, you can then be more informed when you approach a digital marketing expert to help you. You’ll know the questions to ask and you’ll know exactly what you need and what you’ll receive for your budget. 

More on the Hybrid 80/20 rule…