Digital marketing is getting more complicated and robust every day. So what are the three must-haves that small businesses need to truly grow their business today?
Talented tam
The first must-have is a talented team. Gone are the days of just marketing, spending an hour a week, or a month (especially when it comes to finding best dropshipping products). Or being managed by one person. It’s far too complicated now. Now, to be successful, you really need somebody talented with marketing execution and ad management. You need a good designer for branding. Probably need somebody good at photography and video as well if it’s not that same person. You also need somebody good at content marketing. And just creating content ideas and social media marketing, and reputation management. The list goes on. It’s a full-time job for a full time team. And so that’s what you need to be successful. You can’t be truly successful at growing your business if you’re also trying to focus on those things. You only have so many hours in the day. So you need to have a team of people dedicated and focused on driving your success, developing your strategies, managing your campaigns and your budget, to truly grow your brand, create awareness, and drive your business forward. So you can focus on growing your business while they focus on driving you business.
Now, the problem is an in-house team can be pretty expensive, right? Especially to have the talent that you’re looking for. And so that’s the issue with small business, and that’s why solutions like SaleSource and others work well, because you get a dedicated team of talented people to do these things that are really low cost because they’re outsourced. They’re more of a virtual marketing team. But that’s what you need today to be successful.
Multi-Channel Marketing Platform
The second must have today, is a multi-channel marketing platform. Today you can’t get away with just advertising on one channel, right? At the core, marketing is about getting in front of the people that are your potential customers. And they’re spending their time on all kinds of channels, right? They’re on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and Hulu. And listening to Spotify Radio, and all these other places digitally. Watching TV digitally nowadays, right? You got YouTube TV, you got all these things today, they’re spending all their time on digital, so the question is, how do you get in front of them on those popular channels? And that’s called multi-channel advertising (which also helps with aliexpress best sellers). So you need a platform that helps you manage all of those things in one place. From one login and one budget, you can manage all your campaigns and see the results you’re achieving, on those different channels so you can do more of what’s working and less of what’s not over time to get the really strong ROI.
But outside of that, also a fully integrated platform with your CRM, and customer billing, and payments, and email marketing and all those things that you need, to really manage, not just market your business, but manage it through one platform. And so, there’s not a lot of options out there, right? But take a look at different options. See what fits your business, and take a look at Marketing 360 as well. It has those features, but the beauty is it also has the talent piece. That’s one thing to look out for, is there’s a lot of great platforms out there but they don’t have the service element. They don’t have the talent that you need to get things done. Look for something that has a combination of both talent. and technology.
Budget
The biggest must-have for small business marketing today is budget. You have to have a budget, right? Marketing isn’t free. It’s something you need to invest in. And it’s a competitive environment, right? And so the key here is, you need to have a budget that’s competitive to your competitors. So maybe you don’t need to spend as much as your competitors, but you need to be at least in the realm of reality to be competitive. So if they’re spending X amount of dollars, you need to be investing X amount of dollars, near that, to be competitive to them. Or they’re just going to be seen more, right? Running digital billboards isn’t free. When you run digital billboards in your area, so people driving by see your brand, there’s a cost to that, right? There’s also a cost to advertising to your target market on Facebook and Instagram and digital TV, and digital radio. And so what is your budget to invest in getting there. You have to be in front of your potential customers to eventually earn their business.
My recommendation is to invest at least $20 a day, maybe $15 a day minimum per channel. So if you’re on five different channels, you’re talking about $75 to $100 a day investment for a local business in a local area to target the consumers and get your brand out there. And so, think about that. Try to invest in it. At the end of the day, marketing to a business, is like food and water for a human. Without it, we don’t really grow, right? We just get, we skinny and shrivel up. If we don’t fill our bodies with fuel, right, with food and water. And a business has that same issue with marketing. You have to feed your business every day. Are you giving it three meals a day, right? That’s $60 to $100 a day, investment into your business. If you do it’s going to be very healthy. And so think about what your daily budget is, to invest in these multi-channel advertising channels, and get your brand out there, to truly grow your business.
I can promise you this, if you do that you’re going to see far more come in, in terms of sales, then is going out in terms of marketing. You’re going to see a huge return on your investment. If you’re putting a dollar into marketing andyour getting two dollars out the other side in sales, why wouldn’t you just spend as much as you possibly could to get more sales, right? It just makes sense. It’s like you go to the ATM machine, and you ask for a dollar and it just gives you two. You get one free. Wouldn’t you keep just asking for a dollar. You just would forever, right? And that’s investing in your business, and investing in marketing.
