This blog was co-written by Jess Stark and Cheri Gaudet.

Do you live in a Fantasy World when it comes to your marketing? Do you believe that marketing is a part time job, or that you can just hire it out and forget about it?

Here are some reasons why that type of attitude is not the healthiest for your business plan:

1. No one knows your product or service better than you do. In part, this means getting your sales team involved in marketing planning. Your marketing plan will work best when you have sales and marketing synchronization. Your sales team is an invaluable resource to your marketing team, because they hear from prospects all the time about what's happening in the marketplace, what their needs are, how they process information, and other factors that affect their decision to buy.
2. No one is as excited to share your knowledge as you are.  Perhaps you own a small business that you built from the ground up, or you've spent the last 25 years climbing to the top in your industry. It takes passion to make it as far as you've come! That passion will bleed through in your communications.
3. Marketing is part of the sales process and it is best to have your top salespeople adding to the content. Gone are the days of tension between Sales and Marketing. Sales people are on social media, helping to write ebooks, coming up with campaign ideas and more. The more they contribute, the better marketing gets at setting up leads for them.
4. It keeps you in control of the big picture. Among many other things, marketing helps you estimate how many leads your sales force will get, which in turn helps them estimate how much business they can close, which then helps the business estimate how much revenue to expect. For example, companies that use Twitter average 2x more leads than those than don't, and companies with 1,000+ Twitter followers get 6x more traffic, which boosts leads as well. That could make a big difference to sales results and revenue expectations. Paying close attention to marketing, especially online, has effects that trickle all the way down to your bottom line. 
5. You will understand the results (and the process) better if you participate. Like many projects, implementing a marketing plan can sometimes feel a bit like controlled chaos. When you collaborate with your marketer to set your online marketing goals and objectives, she starts with a clear picture of what you are trying to accomplish. This allows her to create an internet marketing plan that will keep everyone sane and on track. Better yet, there will be no doubt when project milestones and goals are reached, because you were involved in identifying exactly what those points look like.
6. Your marketer isn't a mind reader. He/she may be talented, but the most critical ingredient for creating good content is YOU. We can spend hours researching, guessing, finessing words and walking on eggshells around concepts that you could bang out on a keyboard in 15 minutes, because you're just that good. That means you and your marketer need to stay in close contact and work together to create content. In fact, every stage of the marketing strategy requires your involvement if it's going to be a raging success.

Hopefully we've convinced you that you need to stay involved even when you outsource marketing.

If marketing has been more of an afterthought than an integral part of your business growth, you can bring it back into focus by year-end with some help and perspective. And it is as painless as a phone conversation.