What Marketing Tasks Should a Small Business Owner Never Delegate?

By ERIN LARISON

COO, Larison Media

If you're trying to grow a business, you should probably delegate a lot of your marketing.

You don't need to personally manage your Google Ads, edit videos, update your website, design social media graphics or figure out why your conversion tracking suddenly stopped working. At some point, doing all of that yourself becomes a terrible use of your time.

That's why you hire people.

But there's a difference between delegating the work of marketing and completely removing yourself from the direction of your marketing.

Your marketing team can bring expertise you don't have. They can develop strategy, create campaigns, write content, analyze data and turn your ideas into something much more polished than you would have had time to create yourself.

What they can't do is know your business better than you do.

They aren't sitting in every sales conversation. They don't hear the weird question three customers asked this week. They don't automatically know which service you secretly want to stop selling or which type of customer is the most profitable for your company.

They need some of that from you.

So yes, delegate your marketing. Please delegate your marketing. Just don't disappear from it completely.

You need to tell us where the business is going

A marketing team can help you figure out how to get somewhere. We can't decide where "somewhere" is.

Let's say you own a local service business and you've decided you want to move away from small, one-time jobs and build more recurring commercial work. That's a pretty important thing for your marketing team to know.

Otherwise, we could build a campaign that generates 50 leads for exactly the kind of work you don't want anymore. The campaign might look great on a report. Cost per lead is down and lead volume is up, but strategically, we've grown the wrong thing.

Your marketing team needs to understand what you're trying to build. Which services are most important? Which customers do you want more of? Are there parts of the business you don't want to grow? Do you have capacity for more work right now? What would meaningful growth actually look like over the next year?

Those aren't really marketing questions. They're business questions that determine what the marketing should do.

A good agency should challenge your thinking, bring ideas and help sharpen the strategy. But leadership still has to decide where the business is trying to go.

You know things about your customers that your marketing team can't find in a report

Marketers have access to an absurd amount of data. We can see what people search, which ads they click, which pages they visit, where they leave your website, what content performs and how much it costs to generate a lead.

That's useful, but your team hears things we can't see in Google Analytics.

Maybe customers keep saying they've called three other companies and nobody got back to them. Maybe prospects are surprised by the price because they don't understand what goes into the service. Maybe people keep telling your salesperson that they chose you because someone finally took the time to explain how the process works.

That's incredibly useful marketing information.

Those conversations tell us what people are worried about, what they misunderstand, what frustrates them about your industry and why they ultimately choose you. If your marketing team never hears any of that, they're left making educated guesses about what matters to your customer.

You don't need to sit in a three-hour marketing meeting every week and recount every conversation you've had. Build an easier feedback loop. Share recurring questions. Forward an interesting customer email. Let your agency hear a few sales calls. Tell them why you lost a big opportunity or about the objection your salesperson suddenly seems to be hearing everywhere.

The closer marketing gets to the actual customer, the less likely it is to create generic content based on what we think customers care about.

Your brand can't exist entirely inside the marketing department

This is where brand voice, stories, video and photography all come together for me.

Your agency can write your content. We can plan the video, shoot it, edit it and distribute it. We can take the photos and make sure everything looks good. But at some point, we need access to the real business.

If we're writing for you, we need to know how you actually talk. Are you funny? Direct? Technical? Casual? Do you explain everything in enormous detail, or are you the person who gets to the point in 30 seconds?

Give your marketing team examples. Send an email you wrote that sounds particularly like you. Let them hear you answer a customer question. Tell them the words you absolutely hate and would never say.

And give them the stories.

Tell them about the customer everybody else said couldn't be helped. Tell them why you started the company. Tell them about the employee who started at the front desk and now runs a department. Tell them about the project that went completely sideways and what your team did to fix it.

Those are the things that make marketing sound like your company instead of a reasonably competent description of any company in your industry.

The same is true visually. Stock photography has its place, but if someone spends 10 minutes on your website and social media and still has no idea what your people, office, product or work actually look like, you've missed an opportunity.

You don't have to become an influencer. You don't have to spend three hours a week making videos. You don't even have to enjoy being on camera.

But every once in a while, your marketing needs the actual humans.

The best marketing relationships work both ways

We've had clients come to us with an incredibly clear understanding of their customers, their brand and where they want the business to go. They don't necessarily know how to turn that knowledge into an ad campaign, a website or a content strategy.

That's why they hired us.

And that's exactly how it should work.

Your marketing partner should bring expertise you don't have. They should understand the platforms, know how to build and test a strategy, see opportunities you may be too close to the business to notice and be willing to challenge some of your assumptions.

But they also need what you know.

Maybe your sales team has learned that customers don't actually care about the thing you've been promoting for the last three years. Maybe your best customers all come to you for a reason that barely gets mentioned on your website. Maybe you've learned that a particular service sounds profitable but creates headaches every single time you sell it.

That's information a good marketing team can do something with.

You don't need to tell them how to build the campaign. You need to make sure they understand the business they're building it for.

You also need to tell us what "working" actually means

This is another place where business owners sometimes hand over too much.

Marketing teams can measure a lot of things. Website traffic, impressions, clicks, rankings, conversions, engagement, cost per lead and about 400 other numbers can all end up on a dashboard.

But marketers don't get to decide which of those things makes your business healthier.

Imagine we generate 200 leads this month. Sounds great.

What if half of them want a service you barely make any money on? What if your team only has capacity to handle 50? What if your sales team closes 5% of them? What if one campaign generates fewer leads but those customers are worth five times as much over the course of the relationship?

Suddenly, "we generated 200 leads" isn't enough information.

Your marketing team needs business context. We need to know what a good customer is worth, which products or services are most profitable, what your close rate looks like, whether customers stick around and how much capacity you actually have.

You don't need to personally build the dashboard or analyze every campaign. But you do need to help define what success means.

That's how we get from reporting on marketing activity to figuring out whether the marketing is actually helping the business grow.

So what should you delegate?

A lot.

Please don't read this article and decide you need to take your SEO back in-house and start designing Facebook graphics at 11 p.m.

Delegate the execution to people who are better at it than you are. Let your marketing team manage campaigns, build websites, write copy, edit video, handle SEO, design graphics, create emails, analyze performance and keep up with platforms that seem to change every 15 minutes.

Then give them access to the things they can't manufacture: your direction, your customer knowledge, your people, your stories, your perspective and your definition of a good customer and a successful outcome.

The best agency relationships aren't the ones where the business owner does half the marketing. They're also not the ones where the owner signs the contract, disappears for a year and hopes the agency figures everything out.

They're partnerships where both sides bring something the other doesn't have.

Your marketing team should bring the marketing expertise. You should bring the business.

That's usually when the good stuff happens.