Small businesses aspire to thrive in a growing, competitive market. Often, this requires reaching a larger demographic, outperforming the competitors, and boosting business. However, key managers are often caught in the daily nitty-gritty to have a bird’s eye view. To overcome such a shortcoming, you will need a dedicated expert.
And, if you want to boost business performance on a large scale, think of a marketing expert. Such talent is useful if you need more time, resources, or knowledge to promote your business with a singular objective — growth.
This is especially true in case of a business that’s in the growth phase. Businesses not having a full-fledged marketing team often hire a marketing expert who can help boost business performance by planning and implementing marketing strategies.
These experts leverage their experience and modern tools to run campaigns in sync with the business’s vision and channeling the team towards a common goal.
Need for a marketing expert
Small businesses often need marketing experts to leverage minimal effort marketing for maximum results. They can help develop and implement an effective marketing strategy to build a larger audience, increase brand awareness, and generate more leads.
In all, marketing experts can:
- Increase inbound leads: An expert can minimize hassles in the sales process by opening the sales door through inbound marketing efforts. This approach involves establishing rapport with the target audience through social media, email, and other web content. They often rely on CRM to use customer data for inbound marketing campaigns.This approach involves establishing rapport with the target audience through social media, email, and other web content. They often rely on CRM to use customer data for inbound marketing campaigns.An expert can streamline the sales process with inbound marketing efforts, building rapport through social media and email. For additional insights, explore on Designrush.
- Help in integrating configure, price, and quote (CPQ) with CRM: Marketing experts ensure quality results by collaborating with sales teams. Through the integration of CPQ software with marketing CRM, they enhance visibility and functionality across processes. While CRM allows sales teams to access order history, CPQ facilitates the access to open quotes, history with the brand, and support information. If you're unfamiliar with the term, you can explore this CPQ definition to understand its importance in the sales process.
- Remarket smartly: Since marketing experts dive into past sales, they craft a remarketing campaign based on readily available sales figures from the sales team.
- Ensure brand consistency: Small business growth also requires effective strategies emphasizing brand consistency, boosting sales, expanding into new markets, increasing customer loyalty, and driving customer engagement without deviating from the brand's key philosophy. Here, expert marketers can help craft a data-driven plan that ensures reaching and engaging the target audience.
Signs Your Small Business Needs a Marketing Expert:
If you are still unsure whether your business needs a marketing expert, we have a few tell-tale signs that can help. Use these as a guide to plan your way ahead.
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Your sales are consistently low
You can compare a year-on-year report across all stages in the sales pipeline of your company to see if your sales are growing. If not, then your small business is bound to remain stagnant. If you see this sign, it indicates that your small business needs a helping hand from marketing experts.
Hiring a marketing expert can increase sales for small businesses by analyzing your current market, identifying potential growth areas, and developing effective strategies for increasing your profits.
For starters, the right marketing experts understand the importance of a comprehensive digital presence that helps tap new customers (through increased reach). They will be able to create an online strategy that maximizes visibility and increases engagement with potential customers.
This could include website design or development, content creation, search engine optimization (SEO) techniques for small businesses, social media management, email campaigns or other digital marketing strategies. An optimized digital presence for a small business ensures properly reaching out to target audiences and building relationships with new and existing customers.
A skilled marketing expert may also propose developing an effective customer loyalty program which helps build relationships with repeat customers. This is crucial in boosting sales through upselling and retaining customers. This approach encourages customers to buy more from the company instead of its competitors due to incentives such as rewards points, discounts, etc.
Moreover, marketers leverage analyzing customer data through various online analytic tools such as Google Analytics to gain insights into their target customers, what drives them towards certain products/services, etc. This helps your small business tailor specific messages accordingly, which helps drive home conversions.
Boosting low sales requires tying up & collaborating with relevant influencers and partners. This helps to leverage their popularity and credibility among consumers, increasing brand awareness at minimal cost and thereby boosting sales.
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Your team lacks expertise in marketing
Many small businesses will have a marketing department having a few people with certain roles. These people often know many things or have a good grasp of ideas like the four P's of marketing or running a digital marketing ad campaign. But an expert, on the other hand, has the necessary skills, traits, and experience in a specific task to deliver results.
Moreover, a small team may feel overwhelmed by simply performing too many daily tasks. But, experts have quick access to tools, resources, and strategies that deliver quick, effective results with lesser effort. For instance, a Google-certified digital marketer can be relied upon to implement proven strategies that provide demonstrable outcomes.
There are some reasons why hiring a marketing expert is an important decision when you need to add more knowledge to an existing team, and they can help you with the following:
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Save Time And Money
Experienced marketers know what works best when it comes time to drive results. And this can save time (and consequently money) as they advise on which tactics will work best for each situation as well as a guide with the following:
- Allocating budget
- Choosing the right channel
- Utilizing the available resources (team and technology) effectively.
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Access to expertise and resources
With someone with extensive marketing experience at your disposal, you can tap into their expertise and resources without having to go through a long learning process yourself or invest in pricey marketing courses. Access to this expertise can make all the difference when launching campaigns or creating content that will help drive traffic and leads into your business.
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Strategies and solutions that work
Experienced marketers are armed with strategies tested before across numerous industries. Hence, there’s no trial-and-error process required to get results quickly. They also understand current trends within digital platforms such as Google Ads/Facebook Ads etc. and help leverage these channels efficiently while avoiding costly mistakes.
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Discover new insights about your business & industry
An experienced marketer will bring an outside perspective which could uncover new insights into your business model/industry that hadn’t previously been considered. This will overcome the lack of marketing knowledge – allowing for greater growth opportunities to drive business growth.
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You aren’t able to spend adequate time on marketing tasks
You're handling payroll, evaluating sales, recruiting personnel, supervising day-to-day operations, etc., you're overextended if you're handling payroll, evaluating sales, recruiting personnel, supervising day-to-day operations, etc. Also, your internal team may work on different marketing initiatives like email marketing, event organizing, and social media. But result-driven marketing is a labor-intensive process which requires following timelines, audiences
There's just so much you can do while dividing your focus. However, you must pay attention to everything else in favor of marketing. Therefore, consider working with experts to handle key marketing operations instead of diverting your attention from your core competencies.
There is an essence of timing that marketers need to follow when it comes to running campaigns for effective results. For instance, a marketer will drive digital activities with work in the following areas:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Running pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns
- Creating display ads
- Crafting email campaigns from scratch or existing templates
- Postings on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook
- Leveraging influencers on social platforms
Additionally, they know how to create targeted content and when to market it based on their research. The strategic approach these professionals take ensures that your business reaches the right audience at the right time with the right message. With experts, your other team members can focus on their key activities and effectively use their time to contribute their skills for the best results.
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Your campaigns aren’t performing well
You may run many marketing campaigns that need to get the desired results. If that’s the case, it is time to rope in marketing experts. Consult a marketing pro who can take control of your marketing campaigns and deliver desired results.
Onboarding a marketing expert to improve campaign performance will help you with the following:
- Expertise of a digital marketer
A conventional marketer may offer the best solution. Instead, working with a digital marketer allows tapping into the extensive experience of someone who knows how to craft successful campaigns. They implement their knowledge of the latest industry trends and run campaigns based on data-backed insights.
- Strategies tailored to your needs
A marketing expert understands your business goals and objectives and can tailor strategies. They can create custom campaigns that target specific audiences, which can help you reach the right people with the right message.
- Improved performance
An experienced marketing expert can help you optimize your campaigns for better results. They can identify weaknesses in your current strategies and suggest ways to overcome marketing loopholes to boost business growth.
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Your competitors are superseding you
Another reason why your business can’t take off is competition. With many small businesses operating in the same market, attracting customers is often difficult. Therefore, you’ll need a concrete plan and equally robust efforts and expertise to compete against rivals.
As long as you have planned for the effects of competition in your company, there is no need to lose hope. A digital marketing campaign is a great technique to help your business stand out against the rest.
A small business needs a marketing expert when competitors are doing better in the same space. Having marketing experts onboard can provide valuable insight into competitors' performance, review and analyze their strategies, and identify where they are getting the most exposure. Based on that, they can suggest effective ways to match or exceed their performance.
A marketing expert can also help you create a unique and effective marketing strategy that can improve your visibility, increase your customer base, and ultimately increase your overall sales.
- Your ROI isn’t as planned
According to Deloitte's Annual CMO Survey, marketing will use around 13.6% of a company's expenditure in 2023. From the prior two years, it represents an increase of 3.9%.
Unfortunately, many small businesses overspend in marketing due to increased competition. There are signs to keep a watch on when it comes to spending for marketing activities. Consider the adequate return on investment (ROI) for your marketing efforts.
It can also signify that your current efforts are costing you more than they are bringing in. Analyze your ROI from various campaigns and determine if increasing, decreasing, or changing your approach is necessary.
Therefore, consider CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) as one of the important elements of successful marketing campaigns. Because if the leads are low-quality or not converting into customers, you may be spending too much on marketing and not getting enough return. Consider revamping your lead generation strategies by changing channels or offering different rewards or incentives for qualified leads.
Wrapping up
If you have encountered any of the signs mentioned above in your small business, it is time to invest in marketing experts to increase their performance. Marketing experts help unlock the business potential to reach wider audiences and get better results from the current efforts and resources.
Growing your business further would require having the right team of experienced marketers who can overcome the common pitfalls. Their efforts would slowly show results as you see the above-mentioned signs disappear and gradually move your business towards growth.
