The Difference Between Owning vs Renting in Marketing

The Difference Between Owning vs Renting in Marketing

We're all familiar with owning versus renting when it comes to housing. Most people don't think about the same concept when it comes to marketing, but we should. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult. All you need is the right plan. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in.

So I'm going to dig into this concept today of owning versus renting when we talk about marketing and there are two facets of this that I want to touch on. Super important to keep in mind as you work on your marketing moving forward. 

Our Marketing Channels

So the first aspect of owning versus renting when we talk about marketing is our marketing channels. So when I look at marketing, I look at nine I'm sorry, eight main channels. OK, the first ones are the strategy, the fundamentals, your target market, what you say to that target market, your messaging. Then you have your website. You've got offline marketing. So direct mail, print advertising, networking might be in-person speaking. Those are all examples of offline marketing. Then you have your content. Are you creating blog posts? Are you doing podcasts? Are you doing a video? Whatever that may be, that's your content. Then you have search engine optimization. And is my business found in search results when people search for key terms related to my business? Then you've got social media, you've got email marketing and you have paid online advertising. So think Google and or Facebook ads, that type of stuff.  Now, some of these channels we own our website. We own our website. We may not own the hosting platform that it's on, but we can move our website from one place to another. Should be fun, right? We own the domain name. We own that channel. Our email marketing, super, super important. We own our email list. I can take that list. I can move it to any different email marketing provider that may be out there, whether it's MailChimp or Constant Contact, Active Campaign. The list I own. That is an asset. I'm not renting that. But when we think about some of the other channels, search engine optimization, we're renting that, OK? We're doing things to help our website rank higher in search results. But Google owns the algorithm. It changes. There are plenty of examples of businesses that were ranking at the top of Google and the algorithm changed and then they were nowhere to be found. So those things are beyond our control. Social media, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, whatever it may be. We don't own those. We just saw earlier this year, former President Trump's Twitter account being shut down. He didn't own that. And once they shut it down, man, he didn't have much of a voice at that point. So we don't want those types of things to happen to our business. 

Taking Advantage of Channels We Rent

OK, so when we want to take advantage of channels that we rent, like social media, like paid advertising, but we want to use those channels that we rent to drive people over to channels that we own, to our website, to our email list, especially. So when we're attracting and engaging people via social media or via paid ads, we want to get those people on over to our email list as quickly as we possibly can, because that is now a channel that we own. Super, super important. So as you're thinking about the marketing channels that you're using within your business, it's OK to use marketing channels we rent and we should, but we want to make sure we are not reliant one hundred percent on those channels we are renting and we want to get those people over to channels that we own. Super important.

Implementation and Execution of Owned and Rented Marketing

Now, the second aspect of owning versus renting and marketing is with the actual implementation and the execution of our marketing. Who's managing our social media? Who's doing the blog posts or creating the videos, who's handling our website? And most businesses fall into the camp where they're it's a blend. They're handling some of the implementation and execution in-house and then they're outsourcing other aspects of it. There is no right or wrong answer here. You just need to keep in mind there's a couple of mistakes that I see people making when they're looking at owning versus renting. Some people fall into the trap of I've got to own everything. And what they do is they hire somebody. A marketing manager or some type of entry-level marketing person? OK, I don't care what you call it, but that person is a forty to maybe seventy thousand dollar a year position. And they think that that one person can manage their entire marketing efforts. They are expecting a forty to seventy thousand dollars a year person in some cases to do well into the six-figure comp range work. It is not going to happen. It is not realistic. So not only that marketing is so diverse at this point, there are so many things going on, it is unrealistic to think that one person can do everything. So don't fall into that trap. I've seen people do it over and over and over again. If you're ready to hire that person and bring them in staff and you can keep them busy, that is totally OK. But I think it is really important to make sure that you still have that marketing consultant or that marketing agency driving the overall plan. If you don't have that capability yourself as the business owner, which a lot of times, you know, some business owners are great at marketing, and if you are, then awesome, you don't need to worry about it. But if that's not your thing, it's and it's you're not capable of doing that. Own that, have the awareness to know that and hire somebody who can drive that for you, but you've got to be realistic about the capabilities and the knowledge that you have in-house. If you've got it in-house, great, do it. But if you don't, it's OK to hire it out, work with the coach, work with the consultant or an agency to drive those things. But just make sure that there is one person who has the knowledge of what's going on and driving the entire thing, because that's another mistake I see businesses make all the time is they got their outsourcing and they got a web person and they got a social person and they may have somebody doing SEO, but no one person is driving the entire effort. And when that happens the plan becomes totally disjointed. The left hand is not working in concert with the right. So avoid those two mistakes when you're looking at owning vs. renting when you're talking about marketing, implementation, and execution. So I hope you found this helpful. It's a really important distinction to think about that most people skip.

Conclusion

If you start to work on this and you're running into roadblocks, ceilings and you need some outside eyes, please feel free to pop on over to our website rialtomarketing.com. That's R-I-A-L-T-O marketing.com. Click on the Get a free consultation button. Be happy to give you some outside eyes. Help you get some clarity on where you need to focus your marketing efforts right now and push through those roadblocks. So hope you found that helpful. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. Till next time, take care.