The Value a Marketing Expert Brings

I’ve been working with a client who also has an administrative assistant. Typically, this is my ideal scenario.

This tells me that a business owner has experience delegating low-level tasks and has someone on their team who they trust that can step in and complete marketing tasks too.

This is the first client experience I’ve had though where there’s been some contention between me and the admin. I understand how the value of having someone on your team and with you in-person differs between hiring me for a handful of hours to consult and advise on your overall marketing strategy.

However, there are pretty significant differences in my skillset and what I can bring to a small business that your average administrative assistant can when they are not trained in marketing.

We each have our own strengths!

It’s not reasonable to expect them to take on a big, new marketing strategy when they haven’t been trained on how to do so, especially when they aren’t interested in applying strategy to the content plan, which was the case here.

It’s also not realistic that they have an extra 5-8 hours a week to do what’s often required to implement a new strategy. It can be overwhelming and lead to putting up a wall of defense.

Does posting without a strategy on social media work? Sometimes, but mostly no.

When a client hires me they are ready for the strategy component and I want them to get the best results and ROI possible from the work we do together.

This admin was a bit of a blind spot for this client of mine and fortunately, we were all able to have several candid conversations about their limitations and expectations for bringing this strategy to life.

Overall, it was a learning experience for me as a consultant, in how I approach business owners who have an assistant and how I can better serve their team dynamic and still accomplish the best result for them.

I’ve had several experiences where clients either don’t take my advice or stop applying it months later, which has led me to the creation of a new service that I now offer to past clients. A silver lining for sure!

I’m grateful for every opportunity to learn about new people and clients that I work with. It’s a beautiful part of the work I do.

Thanks for reading.

-A

PS. If you caught the date on this post and saw that I’m working on a holiday, go see my other blog post about working on holidays :) it’s one of my fav productivity tools!