How To Energize Marketing Strategies For SMBs

Have your customer acquisition costs increased over the last few years? Well, you are not alone in this. 100% of the business owners are experiencing that the cost of customer acquisition has increased over the years. This is not only a major problem for a small business's marketing team. There are other problems SMBs are facing when it comes to their marketing. So we have done a detailed analysis of the problem faced by small businesses and have listed down the strategies to energies your marketing with creating a deep hole in your pockets.

The main problems faced by small businesses with marketing strategies are as follows:

• How to stand out in competition: How to build a strong brand and differentiate from the competition
• Allocation of time and money: How to allocate budget and execution time for online marketing strategy? It is very challenging to balance.
• Lead generation: Poorly executed digital marketing strategy burned many small businesses, many of whom felt that they threw money out the door on advertising that did not bring any results. So how to generate a lead?
• Measuring & attributing efforts: How to measure the marketing team’s efforts? It's very hard to track which strategy is bringing results & which channel is performing best.

The solutions to your marketing problems for SMBs

Our Straight Growth team dived deep into these problems and has tried our best to provide a solution for the small business’s marketing team.

Strategy 1: Standing out in your industry

Even though there are numerous competitors available in the market, you don't need to despair.  As the base of every product must be “The product should sell itself.” So here are two points you must consider as your first strategy:

• Think about your brand: Your team should have a very clear mission and vision for your company. They must know what is making this product/service unique. What value your brand is providing to its customers for reaching their end goal. Having a clear picture of your product/service will help everyone in the marketing team to plan accordingly.  Exercise questions like, “What is the ‘Why’ behind your business? Why do you exist? What customer needs are you fulfilling?”
• Understanding the customer journey: It is important to understand the customer journey. We are now the digital world. Door-to-Door selling is now the story of the past. So your marketing team should know about the path a customer will take to find a suitable solution for their problem. We have explained the modern customer journey in detail in our blog.

We will guarantee you that this will help you sort your branding-related issues and will help you to create marketing material.

Strategy 2: Allocating time & money to the relevant channel

The second problem is the rising customer acquisition costs which can be decreased if we focus our time and money on the relevant channel that brings desired results. Focusing on digital marketing is very important for marketing teams to solve this acquisition cost problem. In today's digital world, all the prospects do their research themselves which brings them to different digital channels. Why we are so sure? Here is our analysis: Google processes more than 3.5 billion searches every single day.

So digital is the only way to reach out to maximum customers and sell your product/services. Digital will give you a platform, now if you play the right cards at right time then congrats!!!! You hit the bull's eye.

According to Forrester Research seeing the current digital market, your team must spend around 35% of their marketing budget on digital marketing.

Strategy 3: Selecting the right digital channel

Now, the next big question is where to start your digital marketing? A survey by Econsultancy of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) which represents a variety of industry sectors and firm sizes stated that the digital marketing channels which give the best results are email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, and pay-per-click paid search (PPC).

A study conducted by Econsultancy, 2016 compared the ROI (return on investment) on the different digital marketing channels.

Email marketing is still ranking at the top. So you can target these 4 digital channels for your marketing which already have proven results. By using these digital channels, companies usually see 3 times an increase in leads. These channels are a huge part of the complete marketing strategy for the small business that brings results.

You can’t control Google, Facebook, search engine results by google but your website is the platform you have the most control over, and you should use it as such to gain maximum benefit of digital marketing. First, your team needs to develop a clear brand and valuable content to share with your readers which we have already discussed as a part of strategy 1. Then you need to use this information on your website to attract customers and build their trust.

Follow these steps to build a strategic digital plan:

• Define your marketing goals and measurement strategy against those goals.
• Pull out all your current client data and start applying basic digital marketing with it. A suitable email campaign will be a good start.
• SEO, site performance, user experience are basic for digital marketing. Improve this three-factor first.
• Develop a three-month plan: Test, Refine, Re-test.
• Once your website is conversion-ready, consider digital advertising to jump-start your efforts.
• Create a long-term content strategy to build organic SEO.

Conclusion

If you are facing any doubt or need more information in planning and executing any of these strategies, we will be happy to have a chat with your marketing team. Also, we help multiple small businesses define their marketing strategies and execute them effectively.

Connect to define marketing strategy

Marketing for small businesses is tough—there are a growing number of companies out there fighting for the same customers. You must find ways to stand out.  All the best for your digital marketing journey!!