As a professional in the home improvement/renovation industry, you’ve likely seen a wide range of DIY jobs by homeowners in your area.

Some go right, but others go horribly wrong and end up costing the homeowner more money when a professional has to come in and fix the less-than-satisfactory results.

The same is true for home improvement online marketing. Discover the pros and cons of both DIY efforts and outsourcing your marketing below.

DIY Home Improvement Marketing: Pros and Cons

DIY marketing means that you shoulder the burden for this important business task yourself—or you delegate it to your staff. Some potential benefits include:

• Retaining control over all your marketing efforts
• Not paying a professional service to do the work for you
• Slowly growing marketing efforts on your own timeline and scale

But taking a DIY approach can have some disadvantages:

• You’re already busy running your company. Marketing tasks either won’t get done or might take the place of necessary customer-facing tasks.
• Online marketing is a constantly changing industry, which means you might fall behind the competition if you’re not able to devote time to keeping up with the trends.
• DIY marketing isn’t free. Your time is valuable, and if your employees are handling anything, you’re likely paying them for their time.

Additionally, you still have to pay for advertising and other parts of your campaign. If you’re not watching all this closely, you could overspend, making your DIY marketing more expensive than outsourcing can be.

Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Online Marketing

When you work with a professional firm, you do give up a little control over your marketing processes. But the best online marketing pros partner with you, ensuring they understand your brand and message so they can help you make marketing decisions that work for you.

Other benefits of outsourcing home improvement online marketing efforts include:

• You can spend your time growing your company and taking care of clients
• Experts know how to put each marketing dollar to work for the highest ROI
• Someone else is constantly keeping an eye on your campaigns and overall trends, so tweaks can be made quickly for constant improvement

How closely you work with an online marketing partner is up to you. But the pros-and-cons scale typically tilts in favor of small businesses outsourcing at least some of these tasks if they want the best possible results.