Marketing isn't just posting on social media

If I had a pound for every time someone described their marketing as “the social media stuff,” I could retire the frog logo and take up beekeeping.

It's an easy mix-up to make. Social media is the part of marketing people actually see, so it's natural to assume it's the whole job. But posting is one output of marketing, not the job itself, and mixing the two up tends to cost businesses money, either by spending it in the wrong place or by not spending it at all.

What marketing actually involves

Before anything goes on Instagram or LinkedIn, there's usually a fair bit of work that never gets seen: working out who you're actually trying to reach and what they care about, deciding what makes you different from the business down the road doing the same thing, and getting the message right so it actually says that clearly. Then there's choosing which channels are worth the effort for your particular business, which, for a lot of businesses I work with, is not all of them.

There's also everything that isn't social media at all: your website, email marketing, printed materials, PR, partnerships, events, and increasingly, how findable you are when someone searches for what you do.

Social media might be the most visible piece, but it's usually not the piece doing the most work.

Why this matters for your budget

Here's where the mix-up gets expensive. If “marketing” just means posting, it's tempting to either skip the groundwork and jump straight to content, which tends to produce posts that look fine but don't really say anything, because there was never a clear message to work from. Or to hire someone cheap to “do the socials” and expect them to also handle strategy, website copy and analytics on the side, which is a lot to ask of one role and one budget.

The flip side is just as common: assuming marketing has to mean constant content, when actually a good chunk of the most valuable work is the strategic bit that happens far less often but makes everything after it easier and cheaper to produce.

Getting the foundations right first usually means less content is needed overall, not more, because what you do put out actually lands the right message with the right people.