What every business wants is a well-oiled marketing machine. But if you’re a small company with just a few employees with no knowledge of SEO marketing or brand development, where do you even start?
The most effective marketing teams are those that have mastered the art of efficiently allocating their time and resources. Smaller, more agile marketing teams can outperform even the most well-funded ones if they have the right strategy in place.
One of the biggest secrets is to not overcomplicate things. When you’re setting your priorities, don’t build a Swiss watch – build an old Russian one that works when you get sand in it.
Doing more with less is the key.
You don’t want an Olympic type synchronised swimming team, where everyone is repeating the same tasks – you need everyone to have a different role – coordinate – don’t synchronise.
To achieve this you need an excellent strategy.
Luckily, there are business schools and courses around. A good executive leadership course is a significant but valuable investment, even for a smaller firm looking to build the foundations of an incredible marketing team.
To improve efficiency and achieve more with the same number of employees and fewer hours of work, smart small enterprises constantly evaluate their systems, procedures, and structure.
Asking questions and getting feedback from clients and other team members is essential to make sure that your marketing ideas are hitting the right targets.
By knowing who your customer is you can laser focus on exactly the people who are likely to buy your product or service.
Some of the best marketing outcomes may now be had by small firms with no large ad budget or hundreds of staff.
Here’s how to put together the strongest small marketing team without raising your money or workload: tighten your focus and get to know your natural audience.
The first step is to get to know your customers and what they care about.
In order to advertise effectively to your prospects and consumers, you must first gain a comprehensive grasp of who they are and how you can provide the most value to them.
Always keep in mind that the people who currently give you money — your present clients — are the most vital to your business. People that care about your business will do everything they can to spread the word about it as long as they are happy.
Understanding your current consumers will help you identify the people you want to attract in the long run.
The Value Proposition Canvas is a useful tool, and familiar to those that have done executive coaching, for defining and visualizing your main customer profiles and the value you create for them. Afterwards, you’ll be in a better position to adjust your marketing and product to help even more people.
In doing this, you are following one of the most basic management ideas – that of the Pareto principle – otherwise known as the 20/80 rule.
This says that 80% of your business comes from the top 20% of your customers.
You need to know where you are getting your existing marketing leads from. To what extent do your marketing efforts yield customers? Which marketing channels are your most satisfied and highest-paying clients using?
This is where search engine optimisation (or SEO) comes into its own. Using analytics tools is possible to drill down to exact search terms and keywords that your ideal customer would use to find you on a search engine.
Even using a simple tool like Google trends will increase your chances of attracting the attention of the right prospects.
It’s here that the agility of being a small to medium business comes into its own. You can easily see which strategies, approaches and channels are working and funnel all your efforts into the 20% that are giving you the greatest influence on your market.
This means that you have to keep careful records of your expenditure and results.
For example, if you are spending 40% of your marketing budget on branded corporate gifts in Australia, and the response to these Is that your sales are exponentially growing, and (this is the important bit) you can prove that it is the gifts that are responsible, it is well worth sending out more gifts.
Conversely, if you can prove, through your records, that the gifts make no difference to your bottom line, you can then channel your efforts into more of the marketing approaches that are getting results.
Without a doubt, one of the most cost-effective and efficient methods of marketing to today’s audiences is via “search engine optimisation” or SEO.
This involves using a combination of keywords, key phrases, labelling photographs and making sure they are compressed, finding authoritative backlinks and making your copy entertaining readable.
By mixing these elements and combining ease of search with speed, on mobile, tablet and desktop applications, SEO can be a killer marketing tool.
Properly done, SEO can be very complicated and time-consuming. For this reason, it might be worth looking into the services of a good SEO marketing agency.
One thing to remember with organic SEO is that it is a long game – Unlike paid advertising, the results will not be instant. Equally, your SEO will still gain traction long after the advertising budget has dried up.
Right up there, alongside SEO, email marketing shows one of the highest returns on investment.
Unlike Google or Facebook advertising, email can be more free-form – with none of the rules and regulations that apply to the social media giants having an impact.
This freedom to make up content with no limits makes a refreshing change and enables you to be creative and push the boundaries.
Email spamming is never a brilliant look for any business but done right, a good email sequence with some form of lead magnet or giveaway can be a fantastic way to reach a tough audience.
As always, with any marketing, the hard work is in finding the proper target audience for your product or service and then getting it in front of a buyer.
With the right team of people taking care of the different aspects and audiences you should be laughing all the way to the bank.