Outsourcing Your Marketing with Lindsay White | 99
This week’s guest is Lindsay White, the CEO of White Label Creative. WLC is a digital marketing agency for financial firms and Lindsay also helps freelancers become directors of marketing through her program.
When you first started your entrepreneurial journey, it probably wasn’t long until you realized there was a lot to do and little time to do it. Besides the lack of time, you are often figuring it out on your own in the beginning. From social media to email marketing to blogging, you’re trying to be the expert on it all. So, how do you know when it’s time to start outsourcing your marketing?
On this podcast episode, Lindsay White and I chatted on this podcast about directors of marketing, hiring “implementers”, and how you know you’re ready to hire. Lindsay has great perspective as a director of marketing herself - she oversees a team of expert “implementers” or freelancers, so small business owners can master their marketing goals.
Here’s what Lindsay and I chatted about -
What does a director of marketing do?
A director of marketing or DOM oversees the marketing endeavors of an entire business. Think of them like your guide through an unknown city. They know where you need to go, and what you need to go to get there.
A lot of times in business, we get stuck on vanity metrics. Do I have enough Instagram followers? Is my email list big enough? But in reality, are those things moving your business forward? A DOM helps you craft clear goals for your business, creates a marketing plan to meet that goal, and then uses data to measure the success of the marketing plan.
They can also help you meet your customers where they are at. We often hear what we should be doing in your businesses, but a DOM can tell you what you actually need for your business. Wouldn’t it be amazing to have permission to only focus on the marketing efforts that work?
When do you know you're ready to outsource your marketing?
Not sure if you should outsource marketing? Lindsay has a few gauges to help you determine if it’s the right move for your business -
#1 When it comes to marketing, you are throwing spaghetti at the wall. I talk about this in-depth in episode 82 on Three Phases of Marketing Mastery. But if you’re feeling clueless on where to start, it might be time to hire.
#2 You hired someone, but they aren’t meeting your goals. Maybe you brought in a general VA or hired a high school kid down the street. It might be time to think about an expert hire that can make moves in your business.
#3 You have no more time to give to marketing. Time is the most valuable resource in your business. If you literally have no time to give to marketing, how can you grow?
What form of marketing should you outsource first?
You’ve decided to outsource some marketing tasks, but where should you start? Here are a few things to think about:
#1 Where is most of your time going? If you’re spending hours making social media graphics or days writing emails, that might be a great place to outsource.
#2 Do you enjoy it? The parts of our business that we dread are soul-sucking. Bring some joy back into your business by outsourcing the parts you hate.
#3 You aren’t seeing results with your efforts. You might be putting in hours on Instagram, only to book a client once in a blue moon. Is that worth your time?
If you want more tips on hiring, DOM services, and marketing, follow Lindsay on Instagram! Also, if you are interested in becoming a DOM yourself, Lindsay has a free Director of Marketing Roadmap. You can grab it here.
All About Lindsay
Lindsay White is the owner of the Marketing Agency The White Label Creative, where she and her team provide full-stack marketing services to financial services firms. Lindsay also has an education and mentorship program where she teaches freelancers how to provide expert-level marketing services to their clients.
Connect With Lindsay
On Instagram: @lindsaywhite.co
On her website: lindsaywhite.co
Download the Roadmap: lindsaywhite.co/optin
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Episode Transcript:
Hey there, I'm Jenzaia and this is Market Scale Growth, a podcast created for ambitious entrepreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, and flexibility, and ultimately make more money with weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you. My goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dream
Okay, so before we hop into the episode, I just want to remind you to download my free guide to Facebook targeting audiences. It has been created specifically for teacher business owners and I go through the warm lookalike and cold interest-based audiences that you need to have set up to be running Facebook and Instagram ads. There are checklists and brainstorming pages so that you know you have everything. But as an exciting special, I'm opening up some audience audit calls where you can hop onto a 15-minute zoom call with me and you'll get my eyes on your audiences so that you can make sure not only do you have all the audiences, but they truly are perfect for your business. So head to Marketscalegrow.com/Audienceaudit to book your free audience audit call today.
Hello. Welcome, Lindsay. I'm super excited to be chatting with you today. Do you wanna start by introducing yourself to my audience, letting them know a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Yeah, absolutely. I'm super excited to be here today. I am Lindsay White. I am the owner of White Label Creative, a marketing agency for financial services firms. We also serve others, you know, throughout all walks of life, but a lot of financial services firms come to us. Um, I also own an education platform for freelancers who are looking to pivot into the director of marketing services.
So can you just start by, I guess, touching a little bit on what a director of marketing would do for anyone interested in knowing a little bit more about it? Yeah, so a director of marketing is the. Pivotal person in a business who's overseeing all of the marketing endeavors. So all of the marketing endeavors include, you know, digital print, PR media, social media podcast, all of those kinds of pillar content channels, and you are overseeing the strategic direction of that.
So the way I kind of like to explain it is you have to have someone who is looking at your business goals. and your marketing goals and ensuring that those align so that you can make sure that your marketing tactics are going to actually help you move the needle, rather than just be marketing metrics that are vanity metrics or just something that makes you feel good.
Yeah, I love that and I think it's so important. I think there's been a shift towards needing more of that strategic piece and that data. I think that with the kind of large amount of content that we're all always consuming, there's so much shiny object syndrome, right? You hear this new marketing tactic, or you start listening to a podcast and someone is preaching the need of having a podcast where it's like you might not need that in your business.
You know, you might just be throwing spaghetti at the wall or throwing a bunch of time and energy at something that your audience truly doesn't care about or isn't going to help you meet those, you know, business goals that you wanna meet. So making sure that you have marketing goals aligned with those business goals is just so important.
It's something I feel so passionately about because I've watched so many clients come to me and be like, I've been growing my follower account and it's so huge, but I'm not making any sales. And it's like, Well, do your clients care about, you know, are they gonna buy something from you because of your follower account or because of the content you're putting out or.
Maybe you need to be scheduling meetings with people and talking to them one on one because your business is relationship-based and not like a quick sale. So making sure that your marketing is aligned with those business goals so that you are seeing the results that you wanna see is just so important.
Mm-hmm. , and this like a director of marketing feels like a very high-level position. Would this be somebody's first marketing hire, or how would they go about getting there if you would? Yeah, so I see it come in a couple of different ways. So sometimes businesses will have, I think about things a lot of times in terms of brick and mortar.
So a lot of times like, let's talk about a boutique because everyone knows, you know, a local boutique that they can kind of resonate with. So maybe you have a local boutique, you own a boutique, and you are trying to get yourself out on social media. You wanna start showing your clothes, trying to get people through the door.
And all of that. And so with that, you know, you hire maybe a high school student to help you manage the cash register, who's there a couple of hours a day and you're like, Hey, part of your responsibility is to post the clothes on social media, the high schooler, well cheap, and helping you achieve your goal of getting on social media may not.
Be doing the best job of achieving your marketing goals and business goals for you, because they just don't know what they're doing. You know, they're not social media experts. They're just kind of there playing, exploring, working, and you're paying them, but they're not necessarily the best person for the job.
And so a lot of times people will come to me after, you know, Hi, making a hire like that, and. They'll realize that they're just not getting the results that they want. And so that's when you typically see a director of marketing come into play. Either someone who's made a higher, that's kind of a lower, a lower on the totem pole higher, and they're still not achieving those results.
Or they'll come to me and they'll have, you know, absolutely no marketing. And they know they wanna go directly to the expert because they don't know anything. They don't know what they don't know, and they want to find someone who can come in and build out an entire strategy for them. So there's never really no right or wrong way to go, but those are kind of the two directions that I see people come to me looking for.
Director of the marketing service. It feels like the differentiator between like an implementer, someone who's just like doing it, and then some who like Yes. You're more like the strategic side of life, you're not just doing your thing, you're coming in and figuring out what the vision and the goals and the strategic direction that you would take.
Exactly. Exactly. And so as the director of marketing, like in my agency, we. See that entire strategic direction and then we will also execute it. However, you can hire a director of marketing who will, you know, oversee that strategic direction for you and they can manage a team for you. They can manage your social media manager, your copywriter, your graphic designer, whoever your team is, and you know, give them the roadmap and action plan to follow so that everyone is kind of working down the same.
Or they can give you, as the business owner, a roadmap and say, Hey, these are the things that you need to do to achieve your marketing goals and your business goals. So there are a lot of different ways that people can do it or look at it. Um, it's just really what's gonna work best for you, your budget, your time, and your business.
Are there some key indicators of when you should start looking to outsource your marketing? I would look at your time first. Like, how are you spending your time? Are you spending your time working in, Well, first of all, working on the work that you wanna be working on? Do you love marketing or do you hate it?
Is it like the bane of your existence? Okay. And maybe you shouldn't be doing it. Maybe you should be hiring that out. Um, or are you working on admin? All day long and you need someone to kind of oversee the marketing for you because your time is better spent looking at the bigger business picture or you know, Spending your time on client work, it kind of depends on your business, but I always look at time.
Time is your most valuable resource and it's hard to put a dollar amount on it, but if your time is not being spent in the best way possible, then you probably should think about outsourcing. Something. And if marketing is one of those hot ticket items for you where either you're not seeing results on your current marketing or you are just kind of, that's the last thing on your list of things to do, or you keep putting it off because it's not the most important thing to you right now, then maybe it's time to start seeking out an outsourced marketing team.
And I always, it's that balance between time and. For like everything in your business, you could either spend the time on it or you can spend the money on it, but you really can't like to save on both. Both areas. Yeah. No, you can't. You've gotta figure out where to best spend both your time and your money.
So it sounds like you make partnerships with your clients that you like in their business, and how do you find someone that would be a good partner for you? What are some things? Like I am looking for a business owner? Yeah. As a business owner, first of all, you wanna, before you even get to hire, you wanna be really solid on what your business values are, right?
So like, why, why are you there? Who are you serving? What, is your vision? What is your value? Um, like a list of words. Find someone who. Resonate with those values because you want them to be a team player. You want them to kind of be working towards the same thing as you. And so being honed in on your values, I think is important.
So for me, family is one of my top values, so I only like to work with people who see that because if I'm like, Hey, I, we are gonna have to push this deadline because I have a soccer game I've gotta go to, you know, for my internal marketing team. And it's. I'm not gonna review that blog post until later tonight.
I have to have them be okay with that because family is always going to come first to me. And so having a team that you know works on the same values as you understand that and can be flexible and, and work with you in the right way is super important to me. One of my biggest things is creating a business that you know, works off of your values.
Um, and so that's one of the first things. And I think the second thing is just ensuring. You know what your business goals are so that you can properly communicate that to someone. Because if you don't know what your business goals are, your marketing goals are never gonna be aligned with what is truly going to move the needle in your business.
And you're going to just be throwing spaghetti at the wall. So knowing what your business goals are is super important so that you can properly communicate those to someone, and then really bring them under your wing, treating them as a true team member and not just as you. Hey, you're invoicing me each month, and here's your list of work to do.
Like they're a true team member, they're a contributing team member, and they're a leader in your company. And so making sure that you are viewing them as that leader is really important because that's gonna allow your team member or your partner to know what's right for your business and build out strategies that work and convert and give them that autonomy.
Try things out and let it ride for a little bit. I always say that you know, a marketing tactic or a new marketing endeavor, try it out for three. Because if you don't, you're not gonna know if it's gonna work or not. You can't just look at it after a week and be like, No, this is pointless. Let's not do this.
Um, so kind of giving your marketing partner that autonomy to be the leader that they are meant to be. Mm-hmm. Something that's always stuck with me. I was, one of the first things I heard when I got into Facebook ads, um, was that marketing always works. It's just a matter of when it takes that time and ability.
Like tweak things and move forward. Yeah. But like marketing has been around for so long in different ways, right? Like newspapers and, and tv and now online that it's not like it doesn't work. If it didn't work, we would've thrown it out a long time ago. But just like, Right, it takes that time. So I love the idea of giving your marketing person.
That time and space to To work their magic. Yes, yes. And I mean, it's one thing going back to the boutique example, right? It's one thing if you have a high school student who is just executing on your social media for you, but if you are hiring and truly want a marketing partner and someone to help you reach your goals and to take you to that next level as a business owner, you have to make the right hire.
And then you have to allow them to. Have the space to do what you hired them to do. Um, a lot of times it's hard as business owners to let go and it's really hard to relinquish that control because it's your business, it's your baby, you know. But the moment that you can kind of let go and bring someone in and give them that opportunity, I think you'll start to see the gears turn and that the changes be made so that you are converting more of what.
You know, you are trying to convert rather than sales or um, people or whatever. That's back to that whole like implementer versus a strategic piece of you. Yeah. You do need to oversee someone who's implementing a little bit more and give them a bit of that like direction, whereas someone who's there for strategy will be able to do a lot of that or hopefully.
A lot of that on their own. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And again, going back to that implementer versus kinda overseeing the direction, marketing director type of person, the director of marketing can, they can oversee that implementer for you or you can still oversee that implementer or your director of marketing can implement for you.
So there's kind of three different paths to look at and what's gonna work best for you, how hands-on or hands-off you wanna be, Um, and all of. What's your, what's your favorite way to work with people? Like, of those three different paths you had to pick one? Yeah, so I've worked all different, all three of those.
And the way that I operate now is I am the director of marketing for my clients and then I have a team underneath me that I work with to do all of the execution. Um, it hasn't always been this way. I would say that this is the. It takes a while to get to the point of overseeing my team to do the marketing, but I like it because I know exactly what kind of work they produce, and I know that the execution of all of my client's marketing plans is going to be top-notch because I'm overseeing it.
It's my team. I know what kind of graphics we're capable of, I know what kind of copy we're capable of. I know what kinda campaigns we're capable of, and so all of that kind of is aligned. Yeah. And it's nice to get to that point where you are full-service, right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Now, is there a problem with overseeing someone else's team?
No, not. You just don't know, you know, where, what kind of capabilities they have. If there's a bigger learning curve there. When you're the Director of Marketing and the executor, that was fine for me as well. It. Was, you know, you're not able to work with as many clients and so now I have a little bit more scalability in my business and we can serve more people.
That makes sense. Absolutely. Okay, so then this is just a curiosity question. If you have an online business, cuz most of my listeners have online businesses, what are some of the platforms that you? Are you seeing work across the board and might be, if someone has, is nowhere, where's a good place for them to start in terms of starting with their marketing?
Yeah. What platform or direction would they take? That's such a hard question because I know, I know, I know. I'm just curious about you. Sorry, I'm totally on the spot here too. This is not a plan question. I preach that you can't, There is no one universal place to. Um, because you just don't know who your audience is, what you're trying to do, Like you need to look at who your target audience is, what your business goals are, and then we can figure out, okay, where should you be?
What should you do? Now, are they a, give me like a little bit, are they a service provider or a product-based person? I would say I lean slightly toward the product base. Okay. That's helpful. So product based, I definitely would have a social media presence depending on who your audience is. Right?
If your audience is, I dunno, 65-year-old men, uh, that might not be the place to spend your time. So, I have a lot of clients whose, the target audience is 65-year-old men, like not even joking. Right. And so that, That we don't play on social media for those clients. Yeah. Because there's no purpose.
Um, you're not, you're looking at newspaper ads. Yeah. Like we are looking at totally different ways to find these people. But if your target audience is, you know, teachers, right? Your target audience is teachers and maybe their demographic is ages 24 to. 40. Yeah, they're probably on social media or Pinterest.
Mm-hmm. . So I would play in those channels where they're finding their content, where they're finding their information. And a lot of times, you know, Instagram and Pinterest would be those kinds of places. Um, product based, you also have to have a website. Um, there is absolutely no option in my mind, but to have a website, whether it's an Etsy page or a.
Shopify, you know, site some. It can be something really simple, but you have to have somewhere to show professionality and show that you are, you're the real deal. No one is going to buy a product from someone that they're just like trusting from the internet. You kind of have to show that you are putting together something that is going to help them and show that professionality.
That was such a good answer because it does come down to who your people are. And thinking about your audience and thinking like, are we marketing too? Like tickers are, we are getting right, like teachers who a hundred percent I spend so much time on Pinterest, right? Or right, these 65-year-old men, like I'm thinking of my father-in-law who reads, literally actually reads the newspaper.
Every day. Right, right. And like those are three different groups of people. And if you're trying to target your group in the wrong spot, well you're just gonna be on the hamster wheel. Exactly. And again, you're throwing spaghetti at that wall and you're doing something that's not going to create the results that you want.
And that comes back to, okay, well maybe that was, Maybe you have a business that markets a 65-year-old then and you're like, I've gotta be on social media. Cause that's what I hear everyones. And you're not getting results. You want to bring in a director of marketing and they'll like, Bring me in. I'll be your director of marketing.
I'll tell you, Hey, this is not a good idea. We're not gonna do this, and I will get you results elsewhere. It's so true. The other thing too, so mine's, I'm a service-based business with Facebook ads, and yeah, I have this pull to social media because of who I am as a human. Like I'm a right millennial like I'm on social media, but most of my business comes from referrals.
Right. Like, yeah. Oh yeah, a hundred percent. My service-based business. I stopped doing any social media presence. All my clients are referral clients. Like I've never gotten a client from just social media in general. And it felt for a while it felt like I was doing something wrong. And I for, because see me, we're on a podcast, I'm doing quotation marks there, like doing something wrong, but like relationship marketing.
Is a real thing and it's a huge thing. And so if you have a service-based business, this is me permitting you to just keep doing those referrals. Yeah. I tell the people who are in my director of marketing program all the time, like, you don't have to have a face on Instagram. You don't have to be that person to have huge success, like a multi six-figure business.
You just don't, because relationship marketing is a real thing. Referral-based marketing is real. You don't ever have to have a social media presence if you don't want to. I do think you have to have a website. Going back to the same thing I was talking about in the product-based business. Like you need to be able to show that you're a reputable business, that you have professionality, and that you're going to do what you say you can do.
Um, and I think that that's kind of the home base, right, for where people are gonna find you. But from a social media standpoint, if you're just building, especially if you're just building retainer clients too, like get four solid retainer clients who you. Work with you and help you hit the income level that you wanna hit.
I dunno that you have to have a social media presence now if you wanna, That's a whole different story. You know, like sometimes it's a passion project, but you don't have to to make your business successful. Yeah. No, and I, I, I think that, like, I, and I think many of my listeners appreciate just that permission, right?
Yeah, yeah. What's working for you, what makes sense for your audience, Like it's okay to go in those directions? So thank you. Absolutely. Yeah. You have permission. Um, thank you so much for joining me today, Lindsay. If people wanna get to know you more, I know you have a freebie.
Yeah, I do. I have a freebie it’s about becoming a director of marketing.
Sounds enticing. I do have a freebie. You can find it at lindsaywhite.co/optin. Um, I'm super active on Instagram too, so if you just wanna like, learn more about when you should outsource, I talk about that a lot. And what directors of marketing can do for you. Any sort of marketing education. Follow me on Instagram. My Instagram is @lindsaywhite.co
And I'll have both the freebie and your Instagram linked in the show notes. Thank you again. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It's so much fun.
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