Marketing and I have a love-hate relationship.

The results are powerful when the results exist, yet too often, the results are more aligned with vanity than they are with actual growth.

Marketers are like business coaches (of which I am one) and gypsies, each profession has a low bar of entry and the results are often quantified and masked by generalities.

I can’t speak for gypsies, but marketers and business coaches have real opportunity to move the needles for businesses IF the needle is well defined and well tracked.

Our business coaching firm has been growing over the years as we work with business owners (75% of those are contractors or contractor-related industries) between 2 and 50 employees to help build systems, process, and purpose using our Business On Purpose Roadmap in an effort to liberate business owners from chaos so they can make time for what matters most.

The majority of our business has grown through intentional word of mouth and direct referrals. Growth has not been haphazard, but also not opened to the masses.

We realized that our mission could serve a wider audience if only we had a scalable way to share our value proposition with that audience.

Enter the need for a marketer.

We define marketing as that activity within a business that tells the world, “we’re here and this is the impact we could have on your life…here, try a sample.”

Before I lay out the solution, let’s define the challenge…the elephant in the room.

Marketers have a reputation for obsessing over minor vanity metrics, and foregoing the more important numbers.

We have spent hundreds (at least) of hours and tens of thousands of dollars working with marketers in the past and the primary return has been a volume of likes, views, and impressions.

That is all fine and good, but the primary return on your marketing investment should be the right leads that convert to a sales opportunity.

Be wary of the “branding strategy”, especially when you are a small business. Early on branding comes through the excellence of your work to clients and customers, not the proficiency of your message to non-stakeholders.

Of course, you need a succinct and targeted message. You need clarity and consistency. Early on you can be the one to ensure your message is constant with a clear mission statement, a simple branding guide (standardized colors, fonts, and logos), and as many testimonials as you can get.

As those tools are built you begin building marketing assets that a marketer is able to leverage when the time is right.

The time to invest in a marketing manager is the time that you need to scale your growth in a way that requires more than word-of-mouth marketing.

There are three things that you should have in place prior to recruiting a marketing manager.

First, you should understand the marketing gap that exists in your business. What is it that the marketing manager will do that you, or someone already on your team cannot do?

That leads to the second thing…a written job role with clear and written key results. Resist the urge to search for a marketing role online to copy and paste. Pause, ask yourself, “if this marketer was successful for our business, what would she need to produce regularly?”

When thinking through compensation, every dollar that you invest in a marketer, and the budget for their role, should return three to four dollars in revenue.

You will need to do some calculation, and then have an honest conversation with the marketer about why the compensation is structured as it is. You will want this role to cash flow quickly.

Finally, to prepare yourself for recruitment ensure that you have thought through your existing assets, metrics, and marketing efforts. These are invaluable experiences that will give momentum and runway to your new marketing manager.

As you go on the search for a marketing manager, sharpen your eye towards a few key elements.

First, obsess over the key results areas.

Make sure your marketing candidates understand that vanity metrics are just that; vanity. Your business is making this investment for one reason, to generate leads that convert to sales opportunities.

Everything else, for now, is a distraction.

Second, ask your marketing candidates for past results in other marketing roles.

What channels have they used? What strategies have worked in different environments?

Third, let your marketing candidates know that they will be required and 100% responsible to create and implement the marketing plan. Your marketing role is not a social-media-manager role, although managing social media will play a part.

All appropriate channels of marketing will be expected to be either leveraged or dissolved based on the marketing plan they draft and hold to account.

Finally, ask for a written marketing plan prior to hiring them. Be very clear, you are hiring them to create the plan and implement it, you will be an advisor and asset to leverage, but you will not be the marketer and ultimately the buck stops with them to turn targeted leads into sales opportunities.

Marketing has left a bad taste in the mouths of many business owners, but it doesn’t have to. Marketing is a value-add to a small business if a marketer is willing to do the hard work of generating targeted leads into valuable selling opportunities.

I don’t know about gypsies, but marketers and business coaches can have a major impact on the world of small business if we can only resist the sugary-urge of vanity metrics and target the more substantive and transformational work of actual sales opportunities.