What if there was a way to get a professional marketing team even on a limited budget?
It IS possible and we’ll show you how.
Start with the end in mind
Ask yourself what you want to accomplish with your marketing campaign in specific terms. For example, “I want to add 50 people to my email list next month.”
Data, metrics, checkpoints and some kind of accountability are essential with measuring your route towards your objective. Metrics allow you to identify things that can be improved or things that could be hurting your strategy and need to be turned around.
Also, ask yourself: “Who do I NEED on this team to pull this campaign off?” A team with a smaller budget has to be managed more tightly regarding roles and what you’re expecting from them.
If you’re rebranding your company, you’ll want more PR and design leads to put the image you want into your customer’s heads. If you want customers, you’ll want someone who can handle communications either online or offline. If you’re a startup business, you need people who can nail down how to reach your customers… as well as keeping you away from becoming one of the 90% of businesses that fail every year.
Picture the team from “The Avengers” or “Ocean’s Eleven”. These teams are made up of experts and/or specialists with abilities and knowledge in certain areas. You can also go with a more generalist type of marketer (commonly referred to as a full-stack marketer).
Pro tip: if you’re a startup on a smaller budget, most of your initial marketing work would be best left to the generalist jack-of-all-trades marketers who will be able to get you going in the right direction.
Define the scope of work you need
It’s important to state what you DON’T want as much as what you would like to get out of the marketing efforts. This could range from “we want a print, digital, and social media blitz with our logo and these images on it” to “I just want you to use Twitter twice a day for me to spread my message”.
The more specific you get in scope, the more likely you are to be able to pull together a team for your needs. Defining your scope also gets you more mentally grounded for what you can expect from your team as well as how their efforts fit in with your budget. The last thing you want is to incur further expenses from billable work at this stage.
Think multi-channel
The kinds of marketing teams out there are endless, but your budget isn’t. To get the best bang for your buck, get a multi-channel marketing team that knows online, offline, social, organic and overlooked channels (people still read paper/snail mail!) to reach the masses day-to-day.
If you know where your target market shops, searches and socializes it’s your team’s job to be front and center to meet them where they are.
For instance, having a blog could help you spread your message to the customer segments that want to know more and spend time online. For people who decompress when they get home and don’t go near a computer, you could use a physical envelope with marketing material inside.
It’s a numbers game
You want to know that your team is doing what you’ve hired them to do and how much it’s improving your business. One of the top sayings in data is, “if it can be measured, it can be improved “.
Would you want a marketer that gets high sales… but whose cost results in a net loss for your business?
Asking how much your team is impacting on your bottom line is crucial if you’re going to survive and thrive in a competitive business environment. Ask for infographics if data correlation and hard numbers aren’t your specialty.
As long as you know what’s happening and are measuring returns on investment you can ensure marketing is strengthening your business forward and not becoming your Achilles heel.
Ask for suggestions
Somebody might come across as very passionate about marketing, but do they really have the ideas your business needs to increase sales and conversions? When looking for your team of marketing sharpshooters, ask potential hires for a suggestion for marketing your product using a real-life scenario and see what good ideas and arguments come from it.
Many marketers fall into hypothetical traps of what “could” happen versus what is actually going on in your sector. This is good for having foresight and contingency plans but can cause a lot of mistakes that could be avoided. Having practical strategies and tactics not only shows what your team knows, it also can show you new revenue and strategic pathways from what you don’t know.
Putting good marketing teams together doesn’t have to be a lot of work. Even if your budget isn’t as large as you’d like it to be, you can still find and hire a team of skilled marketing professionals who know how to take your business to the next level. Experimarketing gives you the benefits of a full-stack marketing team at the cost of a single employee. You can find out more about our marketing packages to suit all budgets or send us an email [email protected] so we can discuss how we can best help you.