Blazing Your Marketing Trail: Part 2 - Prioritizing your Route
You’ve completed a review of the essentials for your journey (see part 1). Now, whether you are getting ready to launch your business, or you have been in business awhile, you want to be clear about your business objectives, and then move into prioritizing your route.
Taking Stock
Start by taking stock of where you are. What issue or concern triggered your desire to invest in marketing? What problem are you wanting to solve? Most likely you have some idea, but if you aren’t sure, consider these following factors that inform what direction your marketing takes:
Where your business is in its life cycle (startup stage, growth stage, expansion stage, maturity stage)
Where your market is in its life cycle (are you in a cutting-edge market segment or a more established category?)
What your reputation is in the marketplace and how many satisfied clients you already have
What you’ve already tried and what you’ve learned or want to do differently
Setting Business Objectives: Where You’re Headed
Next - decide where you want to go. Think about business objectives over the next year, then break those goals down into quarterly targets. If you are an established business, the most logical one to pick is revenue. Hopefully, you have already created a revenue model that estimates how many of each product or service you need to sell on average each period to hit your goals. Build in assumptions about the number of products or services sold per client so you can get to the number of clients you need. Estimate repeat business.
If your business depends on subscriptions or memberships, extrapolate that revenue goal into the number of subscribers or members you’d like to have signed up in a year to reach your goal. Factor in churn (clients who don’t renew). If your business is capacity-constrained, either by staffing or physical space, make sure you factor that into your revenue projections.
You will want to do a robust analysis of your profitability and ensure that you are making a profit on the sales you generate! Knowing which products and services have the highest and lowest margin will inform which ones you use for promotions and which ones you want to focus on.
Prioritizing Your Route
Once you have your high-level business objectives in view, it’s time to prioritize your route.
Develop Your Marketing Strategy
Marketing efforts are customer-focused (go back to the definition we gave for marketing in part 1), so when you are deciding on your strategy, we suggest looking at your customer relationship ‘funnel.’ We’ve developed our framework for this process over time, with the initial concept introduced in The Startup Owner’s Manual.
We elaborate on this model in our marketing strategy consult (reach out if you’re interested in one), but the general idea for blazing your marketing trail, is to prioritize where in the funnel you want to invest your effort. An important rule of thumb to keep in mind is that it costs 5-10x more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep one. So if you are an established business, it might make the most sense for you to focus on growing revenue or deepening your relationships with your current customers (so look at strategies & tactics in the ‘Grow Customers’ part of the funnel). If you’ve had quite a bit of customer churn, keeping your current customers loyal and increasing engagement might be the best bet. If you’re a new business, you’ll obviously need to prioritize getting new customers.
Allocating your Budget
Allocate your marketing budget strategically, prioritizing areas that will have the most impact on your goals and yield high ROI. A good benchmark for budgeting is to allocate 2-10% of your total revenue to ongoing marketing. We recommend starting with investment in fundamentals like your website optimized for SEO, online business listing optimization, reputation management, email marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing (the strategies that tend to span the entire customer relationship funnel, making them a wise place to start). These initiatives drive the highest ROI and support long-term growth, making every dollar count for small businesses.
Choosing the Right Marketing Channels
Next, explore various marketing channels, both online and offline, and narrow in on the ones that best reach your target audience. Online examples include the fundamentals listed above, plus digital advertising and influencer marketing. Offline examples include networking/partnering, event and cause marketing, and traditional media like TV, radio, direct mail, billboards, and print advertising. Focus on platforms where your audience is most active and engaged. Consider factors like demographics, interests, buying behavior, and whether you’re in the business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B) space when selecting channels. Because small business budgets don’t go very far, be highly selective about your offline choices.
Setting Clear Marketing Goals
For each channel or campaign you invest in, define specific and achievable marketing goals that align with your business objectives for a given time period. Examples include growing your email subscriber list by 10%, increasing your reach on social media by 25% in the next 6 months, and growing your client base by 10% year-over-year. Regularly review and adjust your goals to reflect changes in your business landscape and market dynamics.
Creating your Content Strategy
Develop a content strategy around key pillars or themes that help focus your messaging. Then develop a cadence and content variety that regularly falls into those pillars so you build consistency and repetition. Create valuable and engaging content tailored to different stages of the customer's buying journey, leveraging formats like blog posts, videos, infographics, and social media posts. Consistently produce high-quality content that showcases your expertise and addresses your audience's needs and pain points, reflecting your brand voice and values. Prioritize evergreen content that can be repurposed into multiple formats so you get the biggest bang for your buck. With all of your content, be sure you think about your call-to-action - what you want your reader to do next - so each piece of content works hard leading your reader along the path to purchase.
Getting Analytics in Place
If you are on a tight budget (and what small business isn’t?), you will want to make sure you know which marketing efforts are working and which ones aren’t. That’s why it’s critical to put measurement and analytics tools in place to track performance. Monitor key metrics around awareness (content reach & follower growth, business listings and review improvements), engagement (content interactions), and conversion (traffic to your website from social channels, key conversion actions on your website, and email signups) across your marketing tactics. Before you initiate a new program, determine what you’re measuring so you’ll be able to decide whether you would make the same investment again.
Building a Marketing Team or Partnering
Decide whether to build an in-house marketing team or partner with external experts - or a combination of both - based on your business goals and budget. Whether you hire in-house talent or outsource to professionals, focus on building a collaborative and agile team capable of adapting to changing market conditions and driving results.
Wrap-Up
With these fundamentals in place, you'll be well-equipped to navigate the complexities of the marketing landscape and steer your small business toward success. Keep your goals in sight, stay adaptable, and adjust the specifics of your course as needed to stay on track. Your marketing journey starts here.
We love hiking, and we DEFINITELY love blazing the marketing trail with small business owners and solo entrepreneurs! If you find yourself at a trailhead wondering where to head next, let’s talk. We may be able to help guide you on your trek.