Marketing is the key to any business's qualified lead generation success, and it should be both calculated and creative; a tool that allows your product or service to reach your target audience and make an impact in their lives.
If your goal is to master marketing like small but mighty teams do, here are 5 ways to create a marketing strategy that will set your lead generation process up for success.
Small but mighty teams know that a successful marketing strategy is not a "hail mary" attempt to capture the interest of anyone you possibly can. Successful marketing has a specific audience and purpose - and small but mighty teams find ways to reach this demographic.
Segmenting your email lists is one way to make sure the right information is getting to the right people. Instead of sending the same content out to your entire CRM database, break your contacts up into smaller groups as targeted lists, and personalize your marketing message to them. Sending relevant emails to segmented lists of your contact list also increases your open and click-through rates, generating better engagement for a variety of purposes. As an example, your marketing strategy for existing customers needs to be different from your messaging for new leads that you just captured at a tradeshow.
Aside from getting better results via targeted lists, keep in mind that sending broad emails to everyone is also a sure-fire way to get people to unsubscribe from receiving future communications. And that's not a result that scrappy teams are happy with.
Social proof is one of the driving forces of successful marketing. It is the idea that people are much more likely to try a product or service if they have evidence that other people are doing the same. You can’t just convince people that they need what you’re offering, you need to show them that other people are using the same product/service and are genuinely happy with the results. Social proof can come in many different forms, including:
Whatever you can do to (honestly and with integrity) prove to your audience that the people in their social circle and others with the same needs are using your product, do it. Small but mighty teams find creative ways to use social proof in their marketing strategies such as asking experts to take over their social media for a day, collaborate with other industry leaders for a social media marketing event, and looking into having official brand ambassadors.
Time is money, so if a majority of your time is spent creating new content, you may be wasting both time and money. If you have an old marketing strategy that worked well in the past or material that isn’t time-sensitive or "stale", find ways to reintroduce them into your current marketing toolbox.
If you have a previous blog that is still relevant, repost it with an update. If you’ve created a longer, more detailed piece (like a white-paper) break it up into smaller parts and use it as a blog series. Keep the idea of repurposing content in your mind as you create new content with an eye toward updating and using it again in the future.
Some businesses feel that they need to have some sort of online presence across every online platform possible. However, managing these can take time and focus away from your brand and the effectiveness of your marketing.
Instagram might not make sense for your business, so don’t spend time loading stories there. What online platforms and websites are your target audience members using most frequently? That's where you need to be. Having a strong online presence on 3-4 different platforms is much more effective than being spread thin across all of them.
No matter what your business offers, you won't be successful if you don’t connect with the people who want what you’ve got. While numbers and data and facts and figures are useful to help you see growth in your business, your focus should always be on the person.
Losing that personal touch and not connecting on a human level with your customers is the number one way to sink a company. Small but mighty teams find the balance between sticking with a strategic business plan and connecting with their customers on a personal level. You can do big things and solve big problems while still staying personable and real.
Above all, small but mighty teams understand the power of communication and relationships in the success of their small business. You know you have a scrappy team when they are willing to think outside of the box to help their partners in the sales team tackle scary quotas, try out new marketing ideas to stretch their skills, and implement creative techniques that make a difference for growing your business.