If you’re a small business owner or a marketing director in a small shop, you’re always getting pulled in different directions.
That’s part of the gig.
But you can accomplish a lot because you have help. And that does not mean that you have to hire anyone or delegate this to one of your employees. There are more options – and I don’t just mean AI. You just need to know where to look for help, and that’s one of the big extra features I offer to my clients.
Scaling your authenticity is a bit nuanced and takes practice, but with a solid plan in place and goals and objectives that you can clearly communicate with subcontractors, you can add value to your brand and your business without adding expensive staff members.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
SaaS comes in many forms and there is almost always a cost involved. But any SaaS tool worth its salt will offer an introductory period so that you can try it out. Make sure to mark your calendar for a few days before the trial period runs out so that you can test the results and assess whether the juice is worth the squeeze.
Committing to a SaaS tool requires commitment: financial, time, training, testing, developing and monitoring KPIs, and more. The trisl period is a great time to do your own assessment. Don’t just set it and forget it. You need to invest those resources early on to ensure you’ve landed the right partner.
Marketing Automations
Marketing Automations are a close cousin of SaaS tools and may come about as a result of your partnership with a SaaS tool. Regardless, the automations are a necessary part of any good marketing program these days. You can automate:
- An Email Drip campaign. Use this to establish your thought leadership. Highlight each of your Storytelling Pillars. Share client testimonials. Ask a one-sentence question.
- Solicit feedback from past clients. Let them know how grateful you are for their business. Tell them how important feedback is to your reputation. Keep asking for a month or so until they give you a review.
- Abandoned cart recovery. You’ve probably gotten hundreds of these. Don’t roll your eyes – they are effective, even and at a small conversion rate, because they’re simple to set up and clients respond to things that are top-of-mind.
- Product recommendations. You know your customer because you’ve already sold something to them. Make smart recommendations, based on their purchase history. These can be a bit tedious to set up and probably have the lowest ROI of this list, but if you’ve gotten this far and have automated the rest of this list, roll up your sleeves and work on this one. You might even be able to insert this content into some of the other automations.
Outsource the Work
There are so many options available if you need help implementing your marketing program. Gig work sites like Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer can connect you with freelancers from around the world. Agencies offer more of a full suite of services and can cost more, but in my experience, it’s about the same as hiring an assistant, with way more variety of skills. You can even post questions on LinkedIn or Reddit and get great information about other resources available to you.
Repurpose Content
You’ve already gone to the trouble of writing that blog post. Can you share it as organic content on your social feed? Can you update the content with new information and update the publish date? You can take past lead magnets and cut them up into digestible chunks and repost that content as well.
Focus on High-Impact, Low-Effort Tactics
Regardless of which method you employ to leverage your time, keep focused on what will make the greatest impact over the medium to long term. If your clients are not spending much time on social media, don’t rack your brain trying to keep the stream current. Just think about different ways to use the content you have in-house that will have the greatest impact.
You got this!
Dolly, the cloned sheep photo credit: Toni Barros from São Paulo, Brasil, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
