I think of outsourcing marketing as a competitive process. The goal is to find the marketer that can get you the lowest customer acquisition cost per marketing

I think of outsourcing marketing as a competitive process. The goal is to find the marketer that can get you the lowest customer acquisition cost per marketing dollar spent. That is the only thing that matters. So I typically get a group of prospective marketers and ask each one how they'd spend (eg. $1000), de-duplicate and then do what they suggest. I give the business to the one who's campaign gave the best results. This doesn't guarantee you will get the marketer that will get you the best results. It does guarantee you will find the one with the best intuition for the next step in your marketing process improvement. Rinse repeat every few months. As an aside, for DIYers, I think Google is back on top. Their AI efforts are having a huge impact on their ability to surface relevant ads. A DIYer can approximate what the big brands are doing with Smart Goals and Automated Insights. The process I described above is kind of like a single step in an ai type optimization process to find the global maximum of your marketing spend.