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No time or money for marketing your business? Andrea Opoku offers 5 top tips to combat your biggest marketing challenge
For some years now I’ve been speaking to business owners pretty much on a daily basis. I come across a variety of the challenges they face, but the one that pops up again and again is the lack of time and money for marketing issue.
There's no easy way to deal with this really; either it's a priority or it isn't. Having enough time and money to do everything you need to is a constant challenge for all business owners, this never changes. What does change are priorities...
If marketing your business is critical to getting a constant flow of prospective clients then you make it a priority. We all struggle getting this balance right: working in your business for your clients and working on your business to make it grow.
One of my favourite mottos is “a little bit everyday goes a long way” Spending a little bit of time on marketing your business everyday or every week can help enormously. It’s the consistency more than anything that makes the biggest impact.
Here are my 5 top tips to help business owners deal with this challenge:
Be clear on the type of customer you want to attract and try to be a specific as possible. Effective marketing starts with the customer, knowing who they are, what they want and what’s important to them. Focusing your business, products & services on a specific group of peoples’ needs allows you to establish a much better relationship with them.
Talking directly to your customer is cheaper; undirected communications and advertising leads to a lot of wasted time and money. Directed communications - the right messages, to the right people, using the right channels - results in increased sales. You are speaking in their language!
Clarify the objectives for your business, the strategies you'll use to achieve them and the activities you need to undertake. Then schedule the activities in detail for the next 6-12 months breaking them down into monthly/weekly/daily tasks.
Planning out what marketing needs to be done on a daily basis helps you include it in your day-to-day business activities.
Also make sure the marketing activities you undertake cover 3 areas:
- Communicating with your existing client base
- Outreach to gain new clients
- Activities to show your expertise or product offering
Understand what it costs to undertake those activities on a monthly/ weekly/daily basis and assign them to new business you gained through them so you can assess the real return on your investment.
Make sure your can check the performance of your marketing so you know what works and what doesn't and can change if need be. I would suggest giving any new activity a good 3 months to see its effectiveness. There's nothing worst than spending resources on something that isn't working.
There are so many online tools available now to make how, when and the relevance with which you communicate to your customers so much more time efficient.
Depending on your business, the level of automation you can incorporate into your marketing can vary from a direct message to an interested party who has just followed you on Twitter to taking that prospect all the way through the sales funnel until all that is needed is a personal message to say ‘thank you for your purchase’ and even that can be automated!
Aside from saving business owners time, marketing automation allows you to see the numbers and track the effectiveness of campaigns.
It doesn’t work for all businesses; many require a level of personal service to be given to prospects in order to make a sale.
Companies like Hubspot, Marketo and SAS all provide platforms that help business owners save time and make money by running their campaigns more effectively.
However, use these systems with caution, you still need a firm understanding of the technology as well as ins and outs of how campaigns work.
If all else fails outsourcing your marketing is always an option, particularly if your business has got to a size where you can’t do it all yourself and you need to bring some professional support.
What’s your biggest marketing challenge? Has it changed for you over the years? Let me know - andrea@greenbeanmarketing.co.uk.
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