Employees who work on small teams may need to play multiple roles to ensure everything runs smoothly. That sometimes means, with such limited resources, that that same small company may not be able to have a dedicated full-time marketing person to help them reach their full potential as a brand.
Here are my top 15 tips to help you expand your marketing efforts:
1. Create a Culture That Encourages Referrals
Create a culture worth talking about. The best referrals come from people you know. Who should know you better than your own employees? Ensure they love the work they do and they will become your biggest champions, sharing your story and your work through social, during business events and over dinner.
2. Strategically Consolidate Your Team Roles
Many roles that would be divided up among several people can be strategically consolidated, allowing to maximise efficiency and workflow.
3. Focus on One Channel at a Time
Focus on one channel and double down until you hit a peak. Small teams overextend themselves with an omnichannel approach. Failing to maintain a dozen channels simultaneously harms the brand more than it helps. Instead, find the best channel your prospects rely on and ensure the whole team is laser-focused there. Once you scale enough, add a second one to the mix.
4. Create a Content Calendar
Create a content calendar for your blog and social media presence. Though it’s a lot of work to create a year-long content calendar, the payoff in overall time saved, optimised content creation and the sharing it will result in makes it worth it. Creating the calendar will help you meet deadlines, take advantage of relevant dates and optimise your content sharing.
5. Develop and Optimise Standard Operating Procedures
Create standard operating procedures and see where steps can be automated. Automating outreach and client acquisition is much easier having a lead qualifier through an outsourced virtual assistant. This closes the loop and makes marketing effective, cheap and scalable.
6. Repurpose Your Content Pieces
One of the best ways to expand your marketing efforts with limited resources is to recycle old content. Be aware of all of the formatting requirements in the beginning. For instance, you can turn a blog post into a newsletter, social media posts, a video series or even a webinar. Be smart and strategic with the resources you have.
7. Add a Chatbot to Your Website
If you want to improve your marketing efforts, consider adding chatbots to your website. Many business owners fall into a trap and hire a big support team, and other areas of the company suffer. You can use chatbots to handle simple customer requests, like password changes. You’ll also have the added benefit of the chatbot instantly contacting new users, which frees your team up for other tasks.
8. Stay Focused on Daily Activities
Business owners with small teams should focus on daily activities if they want to see their sales and conversions increase. Large teams can easily plan months in advance and work through the various marketing platforms at their disposal. You could benefit from looking at your campaigns and prioritising your small team to handle various daily tasks that help you advance your marketing goals.
9. Develop a Podcast
Podcasts are still a very new space and many brands have yet to join the ranks. So, if you can develop a great podcast for your niche and invite great guests, you can provide great content to your customer base and prospects, and also leverage the network of your guests as they promote you to their audience.
10. Work With a Marketing Agency
Work with an agency that can act as an extension of your team. It’s lower risk than hiring five new people, and an agency should bring additional expertise, technology and relationships to the team. Choose carefully and look for one that has expertise in your sector and size of business and also that comes recommended.
11. Follow the Pareto Principle
The good old Pareto principle says 80% of results come from 20% of efforts. If you have very limited resources, identify your 20% and direct your best efforts on this chunk. Later on, when you are able to afford more people on board, you will go back to all the things that you left behind and make them work as well.
12. Hire Freelancers to Fill in the Gaps
An easy way to expand your marketing efforts on limited resources is to use a third-party platform to hire and engage freelancers. You’ll find well-reviewed contractors who can work with different budget constraints to achieve your goals. Grow your small business initially using virtual assistants until you can hire someone. I’ve used getfriday.com for my virtual assistants and as you only have to buy 5-hour chunks of time in one go, it can be very cost-effective.
13. Leverage Influencer Marketing
A useful strategy is influencer marketing, which is partnerships that are generated in exchange for products or services. This represents an opportunity to manage marketing without investing large amounts of resources.
14. Automate Your Marketing Processes
Marketing automation helps businesses automate their processes so they don’t have to perform those actions manually. It saves time and resources and makes customers happy because you get to them faster. Even with a small team, you can use automation to improve operations and grow little by little. For example, we use Hootsuite to schedule all our social media posts and Mailerlite or Mailchimp for our email campaigns,
15. Invest in an Integrated Sales and Marketing Platform
One strategy for expanding marketing efforts with limited resources is to invest in an integrated sales and marketing platform. If you have everything in one place, it will be easy for your team to automate processes such as email sequences, paid campaigns, assigning leads, reporting, etc. This will allow your team to cover more tasks. It’s all about working smarter and not harder. Also, consider using a project management tool such as Trello or Slack that will allow you to sign activities and time frames to project tasks.
A small team can be a great advantage as it provides you with agility and you can take your ideas to market quicker. Maximising your team’s performance and introducing tools and platforms to support you will help you to really move your marketing forward.
