Your staff is already juggling multiple roles so you're hesitant to throw another ball in the air lest they all fall to the floor and roll wildly away.
But you need to implement a marketing process, launch it and stay engaged so that you generate new leads and sales.
This is the conundrum of many business owners and entrepreneurs. What to do? We can offer some help. It won't be easy but it's certainly possible.
Here are 4 ideas for managing your marketing with limited resources:
1. Be Realistic
You need to develop a plan that can be effective and reasonable within the context of staffing capabilities and financial limitations. Developing a complex "pie in the sky" marketing plan that overburdens your team, pushes financial boundaries and has too many moving parts will force your plan back on the shelf where it will attract dust rather than interest and leads.
A marketing strategy that bites off more than it can chew will waste money, kill staff morale and could damage the brand you've worked so hard to build.
2. Target Bang for the Buck
Your resources are limited so you'll need to seek out strategies and tactics that generate the best return for the least investment in time and treasure.
What's more, the leads you generate need to be highly qualified, since the volume of leads will likely be lower due to budget and human resource constraints.
- Focus on increasing your blog post frequency and SEO targeting to improve organic search results. A solid blog can be produced in a few hours time and can go a long way to improving your Google search results.
- Revamp directory listings with SEO in mind to improve organic search results
- Assess and make changes to your CTA placements on your website or revamp your URL titles
- Start a referral campaign and ask your existing customers to put in a good word for you
- Make sure your meta descriptions and alt tags for images are maximizing SEO
- Leverage social media like Facebook and LinkedIn to generate interest
Yes, taken all together what is suggested above is not expensive but it certainly takes time and people power. Start small and build up--repurpose existing content for new promotions, for example. There's a lot you can do outside of an expensive direct mail campaign or a magazine ad that generates leads but not the ones you need.
3. Understand Your Staff's Capabilities and Capacities
Well, if you're still reading this blog one thing is clear: you don't have a dedicated marketing team, not even one fully dedicated marketing team member.
What you do have are multi-talented staff members eager to help.
So, you need to walk a tightrope, here: you need to motivate staff with other responsibilities to adopt marketing as a daily, weekly and monthly job role.
This can be highly challenging. Some team members might love the idea and jump in the deep end, only for you to eventually find out they're spending 75% of their time blogging while neglecting their "real" job.
Others might be resistant and find your request a nuisance and a piling on to their already full plate.
This is where you have to be a great leader- to manage a marketing plan with limited resources you have to make marketing meaningful to all team members. Consider:
- Providing incentives for strong marketing task performance
- Giving regular recognition to those that go above and beyond
- Making a systematic effort to explain that a successfully implemented marketing plan benefits everyone due to increased revenue, which feeds bonuses, benefits and pay raises
- Creating a culture that understands (yet still holds individuals accountable) the added stress marketing with limited resources creates on a staff
- Provide marketing training opportunities positioned as a reward rather than a chore or additional burden on their week
4. Enlist Contractors
Your staff and you cannot handle every marketing task all the time.
- Hiring experienced writers, designers, coders and content creators will give you and your team added flexibility to take the pressure of during crunch time.
- It allows you as the business owner the ability to flex up and down as needed to relieve pressure, both from human capital, morale and financial perspectives.
- Being able to adjust quickly and remain flexible is critical to successfully managing a marketing plan with limited resources.
Those are our 4 ideas for managing a marketing plan with limited resources.
You can market successfully with careful planning, a deep understanding of your team's capabilities and targeting marketing strategies and tactics that give you the most return for your investment of time and money.
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