IIINNN THIS CORNER… Never Enough Tiiiiime
IIINNN THIS CORNER… NNNot Enough Monnnneeyyy
Every day for a small business owner feels like fight night, not enough time versus not enough money. It’s a tough one because growing your way out of the pinch takes sales, and sales takes marketing. The OTHER problem is that Fast and Cheap solutions almost never give you what you expect.
The temptation is to join your competitors who are galloping full-tilt after leads and chasing down sales using a carpet-bombing approach, but a healthy, sustainable focus on marketing may get lost in the dust. And it only gets you part way there.
It’s marketing that drives sales numbers up for the long term. Understanding the differences between the Sales, Marketing, and Inbound Marketing and recognizing the challenges that surround each can help company owners and employees retrain their focus on the most effective methods of finding success.
How Do Marketing and Sales Differ?
People understand sales. There's a product and someone pays money for it because they need it. Anyone who has ever patronized a store understands the rudiments of sales. It goes like this: you've been invited to a party so you go out with the intention of buying a new skirt. The sale involved the ready availability of the right product, in a convenient place at the right price at the right time.
Whatever it was that made you realize you needed new clothes for the party, that you wanted a skirt, and not just any skirt, it had to be a certain one at a particular store... that is marketing.
From a business point of view, the sale occurs in a later stages of a buyer’s journey. Whatever is done to turn a contact into a lead into a customer, it works best when marketing and sales team up to share goals and understand their roles in the process.
Marketing encompasses a wide range of things like brand awareness and recognition, reputation management, building traffic, customer service, and everything else it takes to get a lead into the hands of the person handling sales at the exact time the lead is ready.
What Unique Challenges do Small Companies Face?
In large companies, whole departments dedicate themselves to each of these things. When you only have 10 or fewer people, how do you handle all aspects of both marketing and sales when everyone is already dealing with urgent tasks? With all the information floating around the internet about the best practices for attracting potential customers and clients and also sealing the deal- it may seem impossible to accomplish everything with any sort of quality.
For small businesses, the challenges always seem to boil down to too few people, not enough time, and a teeny budget. And yet, there’s hope. There are ways to make this work with your resources!
How Can Small Businesses Overcome the Marketing Challenges?
Outsourcing
Consider outsourcing. In many cases, hiring more full- or part-time employees is not an option. Onboarding new employees can cost more than outsourcing work to freelancers or another company dedicated to marketing. If you do the latter, you get not only more people working on your content, online presence, and all other aspects of marketing, but people dedicated to the latest and most effective marketing ideals.
Learn about Inbound Marketing.
If the term is not familiar to you, do a little research. The idea is to customize your marketing to the new realities of the internet, to the new modes of communication and expectations of your potential leads. It’s quite different from what companies have done in the past as as the diagram illustrates.
The other plus of Inbound Marketing is that it also uses digitally-powered technologies to automate a lot of what you keep thinking you don’t have time for! It really can deliver sales-qualified leads to your attention without you doing anything except setting it up and tweaking it once in awhile.
Get a time machine.
Just kidding. And we know you would just go back in time with a sports almanac and… yeah.
Time is a problem that many small companies face that goes hand in hand with the lack of employees to help. The more people to do the work, the less time it takes. However, lack of time is not just about getting a particular marketing task done. It also has to do with watching trends, studying the industry, and keeping an eye on the latest search engine optimization (SEO) requirements. Google, for example, is known for keeping its criteria secret and ever-changing as they improve on their mission: delivering the highest quality results in response to a query by an internet searcher.
Two go-to methods for saving time are these: getting more people who know what they are doing working for your company. In other words, be careful about hiring.The second deals with organization. Planning is never wasted time. Whether you want to improve your marketing reach and introduce products or services to new audiences or close more sales afterward, an organized and carefully planned approach saves time and can increase your return on investment (ROI).
Small budgets call for a high efficiency, organization, and deploying people and tools that are as closely suited as possible to the tasks at hand. And don’t forget to build in ways of tracking efficiency from the very beginning. The better and sooner you know where the inefficiencies are, the better. Serious marketing leads to improved sales numbers, which become more profits to grow the company even more.
How Can Marketing and Sales Work Hand in Hand?
Although marketing and sales may seem separated by goal and methodology, they really are parts of the same thing. The classic marketing / sales funnel diagram demonstrates this well. Sales functions kick in with the consumers who flow out the end of the funnel. Marketing techniques get them into it in the first place.
Inbound marketing can be a big help here because it by design gets sales and marketing to work together as a unit. One example of this is the recommendation that the sales team gives input to marketing about their goals and vice versa, and there are measurable ways to track progress with data analysis tools.
Back to that proverbial skirt purchase. In that example, all the emotions, desires, trends, and relationships forged through marketing convinced you to go to a particular store and buy a particular skirt. From the point of view of the boutique, your purchase was simply an outgrowth of their inbound marketing relationship with you. Putting the power of choice in the hands (or screens) of consumers pays off for the marketer. Even though you might be seen by fewer people overall, the ones who do find you are much more interested.
Sales techniques help at certain points of the process, but without inbound marketing techniques the salesperson is shooting in the dark. On the other hand, there is so much data to mine, it can seem overwhelming. Good thing there is a wide variety of inbound marketing platforms that can start where you are, from one customer to thousands.
A couple of computers and a good inbound marketing platform can be a gold mine for a small business owner. Your competitors are already making it work, so don’t fall behind! Talk to us about the advantages of moving your marketing dollar to the internet- we have some great ideas for you. It’s way better than snacking on boxing-ring canvas!
