It’s 9pm on a Sunday and you should be winding down, preparing yourself for a productive week ahead. Instead, you’re hunched over your laptop wrestling with Canva, trying to resize an image that refuses to cooperate, or attempting to fix a broken link in a marketing email that’s supposed to go out tomorrow morning.
This is the reality for most small business owners, where marketing has become the thing you do in the gaps between running the day to day business. The weekends, the evenings, all time that should be yours to rest, recharge and spend with the family.
Commercially, this approach is also costing you far more than you’re saving.
An Efficiency Gap Losing You 40% of Your Productivity
One element I never considered factoring into this way of working was the psychological impact. A client I was working with, happened to mention this in passing and it turns out he was right.
Research shows that context switching, the act of shifting between different types of tasks, can reduce your productivity by up to 40%. That’s not just a minor dip, but losing nearly half your productive capacity.
A common example might be when you’re in the middle of quoting a job or planning next quarter’s business operations. You then remember you need to post on social media or update your website and switch tasks. Your brain has to completely reorient itself. This takes an average of 23 minutes to regain full focus after an interruption.
But you’re not just losing those 23 minutes, instead you’re losing the quality of work on both sides of the switch, where the quote gets rushed and the social post is mediocre. Neither gets your full attention because you’re mentally still half in the other task.
A specialist who does marketing daily moves through these tasks four to five times faster than someone doing it occasionally, not because they’re inherently smarter, but because they’re not constantly reorienting themselves.
They know the tools and they’ve solved the same problems dozens of times, rather than Googling “how to schedule a LinkedIn post” for the twentieth time.
As a small business owner, you have to wear many hats, ranging from founder and director to junior marketing assistant, graphic designer and social media manager. Unfortunately though, you are doing all of these roles at 40% capacity whilst also trying to run the company. This multitasking might seem like a saving, but in reality it’s very expensive.
Expense of Learning On The Job
Every mistake in marketing costs money, from the poorly targeted Facebook ad that runs for three days before you notice it’s showing to completely the wrong audience or the email campaign with a broken link.
When you don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t even know you’re making mistakes until the money’s already gone. Research from Epitomise shows that UK retailers waste an average of 37% of their digital ad spend on ineffective channels.
For SMEs running their own marketing without specialist knowledge, that waste can climb even higher.
I often work closely with other fractional specialists including paid ads managers. One business owner we worked with was running Google Ads and had chosen to use broad match keywords because it sounded like that would get them more visibility. Within a week, they had spent over £800 appearing for searches that had nothing to do with their business. We were able to remedy the situation, but had a specialist been involved from the beginning, the strategy would have ensured the budget was carefully managed.
The painful irony is that hiring someone who knows what they’re doing often pays for itself purely through eliminating waste. If you’re spending £1,000 a month on ads and 40% of it’s wasted, that’s £400 lost. A specialist who stops that waste has already covered a significant portion of their fee before they’ve even improved anything.
Brand Erosion Which Impacts Customer Trust
Competition for customers is tough and people make snap judgements about your business based on what they see. The look and feel of your brand is crucial.
Research by Adobe found that 38% of people will stop engaging with a website or marketing materials if the content or layout is unattractive. They don’t give you the benefit of the doubt and they are unlikely to think “well, they’re probably really good at what they do even though their marketing looks homemade.” They just assume the whole business operates at that level.
This is the brand erosion problem. Every piece of DIY marketing that looks amateurish doesn’t just fail to win that customer, it actively damages how people perceive your business.
If your brochure looks like it was designed in Microsoft Word in 2005, potential clients assume your service will be similarly outdated or if your website has broken links, spelling mistakes, or clunky design, they wonder what else you’re sloppy about.
This culminates in a far greater issue, as poor marketing will attract the wrong type of customer. When your materials look cheap, you attract price shoppers who are looking for cheap. They haggle over every invoice, question every cost and will take up huge amounts of your time, ultimately being barely profitable.
Meanwhile, your competitors with professional, targeted marketing are attracting customers they want, who value quality and expertise. Those customers pay fairly, respect your time, and become long term relationships rather than constant battles.
The marketing quality gap isn’t just about looking good, but about who you’re attracting and what they’re willing to pay.
Mental Impact of juggling marketing & day to day business
Marketing requires creative thinking. Writing compelling copy. Designing engaging visuals. Developing strategy that connects with the right audience.
That’s hard to do when you’re already mentally exhausted from running a business all week.
Decision fatigue is real. Analyses of workplace distraction estimate that employees can lose up to five working weeks per year to context switching and the mental overhead of juggling multiple tasks. For business owners doing everything themselves, that number is almost certainly higher.
Every Sunday evening spent doing marketing isn’t just lost time. It’s lost recovery time. It’s the mental space you need to think strategically about your business, plan properly, or just decompress so you’re sharp on Monday morning.
And it seeps into everything else. When you’re constantly thinking “I should post something on LinkedIn” or “I need to update the website,” those thoughts take up mental bandwidth even when you’re supposedly focused on other work. Or worse, when you’re supposedly relaxing with family.
Reclaiming that mental space is essential for making good decisions about the business rather than being perpetually stuck in the weeds of marketing admin.
When DIY Marketing Does Makes Sense
Not every business needs professional marketing support yet and there are instances where doing it yourself makes sense. If you’re just starting out and genuinely don’t have any budget, the DIY approach is great temporarily. The key word is temporarily. You learn enough to get something up and running, and then you plan your exit strategy.
If your business relies heavily on word of mouth and you’re at capacity with existing clients, basic maintenance marketing might be all you need. Keep the website updated. Stay visible. Don’t overthink it.
But if you’re trying to grow, if you’re losing business to competitors or if you’re exhausted from doing everything yourself, you’re past the point where DIY makes commercial sense. When I first meet clients that are unsure if they should take on a fractional marketer, I’ll often ask the question “Is the time you’re spending on marketing stopping you from doing the high value work that actually grows the business?” If yes, you’re losing money by trying to save money.
The Real Cost of Cheap Marketing
Most business owners think hiring marketing support is an expense and they’re measuring the cost of the monthly fee against the cost of doing nothing.
That’s the wrong comparison.
The real comparison is the cost of professional support versus the cost of inefficiency, wasted ad spend, lost opportunities, damaged brand perception, and your own time being spent on low value tasks instead of running and growing the business.
When you frame it that way, the maths changes entirely. A business owner billing £150 per hour for client work but spending five hours a week on marketing is spending £750 of their time every week. That’s £3,000 a month. Even if marketing support costs £1,500 a month, you’re ahead financially before considering the improved results and stopped waste. And that’s assuming the DIY marketing was actually effective. If it wasn’t moving the needle anyway, you’re paying £3,000 a month for something that doesn’t work whilst feeling good about saving money.
Stop Dabbling, Start Growing
It’s highly likely you didn’t get into business to become a marketing expert, but because you’re good at what you do and you saw an opportunity.
The businesses that grow are the ones that focus on what they do best and bring in specialists for everything else. Marketing included.
That doesn’t mean handing over complete control, but instead having someone who knows what they’re doing handle the execution whilst you stay focused on strategy and high value client work. If you’re looking for the mix of strategy and execution there are some great agencies and fractional teams out there.
This means reclaiming your Sunday evenings, not losing 40% of your productivity to context switching and finally stopping the waste and attracting better clients.
Most importantly, it means your marketing becomes a tool to achieve growth, rather than a chore you dread.
If you’re tired of DIY marketing that’s consuming your time without delivering results, let’s have a conversation about what professional support looks like. No pressure. No hard sell. Just an honest chat about whether it makes sense for your business right now.
Because the hidden cost of doing it yourself isn’t just the money. It’s everything else you’re not doing because you’re stuck being your own marketing department.
