Making Marketing a Priority for Your Small Business
All business owners know that marketing is vital to keeping your business alive, but not everyone knows where to start. Making marketing a priority for your business can be hard, but it doesn’t need to be time-consuming or as scary as it sounds. The point is, you need to be marketing your business, and that should be a top priority for you. How can you get started and make sure you’re placing marketing where it belongs in your business?
Create a Brand
If you don’t have a brand for your business, you don’t have much to market. Decide what you want the face of your company to look like, and go for it. Try to keep all of your marketing material uniform. As far as your logo and colors, etc, you should ensure it’s the same across the board. People will become confused if you switch it around, and they may think it’s two different businesses. You want to be recognizable. Creating a brand for your business should be at the top of your marketing-priority-list, if you haven’t done so already!
Utilize Internal Resources
Often people push marketing to the back burner, instead of making it a priority because they think there’s no money to hire someone to take over. While that may be true, there’s no reason you can’t channel your own creativity and run with that. If you have employees who work for you, brainstorm some marketing tactics and ideas with them. Ask if any of your employees have special skills that could be utilized for your marketing! Don’t push something so important to the bottom of your list, when there’s so much creativity right there!
Outsource When Necessary
This isn’t meant to contradict the point above, but when it comes time to outsource your marketing, do it! If you have the budget to hire a professional to take over, it will be a big benefit to your business. Knowing when to hire a professional to help with marketing can be tricky. You certainly want to ensure you have the budget to do so before you begin your hiring/interviewing process. On that same note, don’t wait too long. If you have enough money for a professional marketer on your team, let them join! They will effectively prioritize different types of marketing and help your business be recognized!
Track Your Analytics
This is good business practice in general, but when it comes to marketing, your data is particularly important. Make it a priority to set up some way to track what marketing is working for you so you know exactly where to spend those hard-earned dollars. Marketing is very important to any business, so knowing what you’re doing is definitely worth being a priority! FreshLime can help turn your customer data into actual sales so you can grow more efficiently and our company Dasheroo can pull data and mash it up with any other data source to create awesome reports to show you how your business is performing when it comes to marketing and a variety of other areas!
For more insights on marketing strategy that actually works for small business, subscribe to the FreshLime Newsletter here. Connect with Jay Bean, Founder of FreshLime and Small Business Marketing Expert on LinkedIn and Twitter. And last of all, if any of these tips have helped you or if you have anything to add please comment below. We’d love to hear from you!