Are You Setting Up Your Team to Fail?
Learn How & When to Delegate
Writing to you from smalltown PA, where I’m celebrating birthdays with my little sister (and first full-time employee!) and trying not to overdo the work stuff…
It’s the first time I’ve seen Paige since our last birthdays (she’s on 2/26, I’m on 3/3), because covid, and I’m really grateful to hug and be near her again. ❤️
But I have to admit, I screwed up the “overdoing work” part. I’ve been working quite a bit.
We happen to have a number of client deadlines coming up, and I didn’t create a better plan for delegating essential tasks.
ROOKIE MISTAKE, AMY. ROOKIE MISTAKE.
And it’s not something I can fix last minute.
Because delegating requires lots of context and explanation.
Or you’re setting your team up to fail.
For example, over the years I’ve gotten a lot of inquiries from early-stage entrepreneurs — many of them searching for someone to “do their social media.”
But when I speak with them about what they want to achieve on social, or why they’re on social media in the first place, they’re not entirely sure…
How can you delegate something without knowing how it works or why you even want it?
Let’s look at a mockup of how this could tank on you… I might want my Instagram post to look like this:
But without enough context and explanation, my team might deliver something like this:
Ick! Not my style. Not the message I was hoping for. But boy it was easy to make using pre-selected templates and gifs in Canva!
Thing is: social media (just like email or your website…) is one point on your marketing mind map. It’s a pretty meaningless time-waster when it’s floating off in the distance, disconnected from the other points in your marketing strategy.
When you hire someone new to run a piece of your strategy, you should be introducing them to that larger marketing map.
How does your social media connect to your website traffic? What are the goals you have related to the relationship between the two? Where are you sourcing visuals for social? What about copy?
Sorry, but if you can’t yet explain these connections, you aren’t ready to delegate.
Before this trip, I didn’t fill my team in on bigger strategy for clients that would inform the work I should have delegated to them. So I can’t ask for much help. It wouldn’t set them up for success.
In my marketing mentorship / mastermind, we spend one week on each of the fundamentals of modern marketing: your audience, your website, your copy & content, your email and your social media. Why entire units on each? Because without a basic understanding of each of these pillars alone, you’ll never be able to plan how they all work together.
I always knew that if you understand the marketing fundamentals first, you’ll save money, save face, and save yourself from confusion.
But now I know it will also save you from spending time on your birthday outing filling in website SEO. 😂😂😂
Ever find yourself here? Want to learn how to avoid it? (Like I do, most of the time?)
I’m opening enrollment to Confident + Consistent Marketing soon… Details to come!
Are you bringing your personal values and stories into your marketing?
You should!
That’s why we created 5 creative prompts for coaches, creatives & consultants to write, produce and share compelling stories in your emails, on social and more. These are the stories that make you stand out in a crowd.
Amy Jacobus is an online marketing strategist who still sends handwritten thank yous. She’s obsessed with helping service providers, entrepreneurs and mission-based business owners increase their impact with smart, human marketing online. Amy teaches workshops and leads programs full of simple, apply-it-now strategies for your website, email and social media, including her signature program, Confident + Consistent Marketing. She has designed courses, facilitated workshops and participated in panel discussions for University of Denver, LEAP at St. Mary’s College, Barnard College, New York Foundation for the Arts, Gibney Dance, The Artist Co-op and Pentacle, among others. Learn more about Amy and her work at amyjacobus.marketing and follow her at @amyjacobus on Instagram.
This article was originally published on her blog, where she shares weekly marketing advice for creatives and entrepreneurs.
