The #1 SMB Problem, and How to Fix It

In a recent survey of small business owners, the most frequent response to the question regarding the biggest challenge to running a small business was marketing.

So, what are the best marketing strategies for small businesses who are just starting out marketing themselves? What about for small businesses who are struggling to achieve a positive ROI with the marketing they are currently doing?

The first step, no matter where you are with your marketing, is to understand what big-picture business-related goals you are trying to achieve. What are your main focus(es)? Some general possibilities might be:

• Increasing your company’s overall revenue
• Converting more prospects in a specific industry vertical
• Selling more of certain products or services that you offer
• Successfully cross-selling related services to your current clients

These goals should be SMART goals: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. And, once you understand them, you have a better idea of how your marketing should be focused.

You also need to understand your business as a whole, and where you currently stand. Conducting a SWOT analysis - where you look at your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats - helps you do this. Some things you could look at and analyze about your business include:

• General awareness about your company
• Your company in comparison to your local competition
• The strength of your online presence (website, social media, etc.)
• Your internal capabilities and processes
• Your current client retention rates
• The quality of your social proof

Without any of this in mind, you won’t be able to focus your marketing, and you likely will struggle to achieve the results that you are looking for.

Getting Started

If you’re starting from the bottom up, you may need to ease yourself into marketing your company or call in some outside help to get you started - marketing for the first time without any experience can be overwhelming. We suggest starting with the following:

• External Online Entities: When you Google your company, you may find online reviews about the service you provide on different review websites. Remember, prospects looking into you will probably find the same websites. So, do what you can to get control and monitor these. For example, Google My Business allows you to claim your business through Google and manage reviews, among other things. 

• Your Website: Is your website vastly superior to your local competition? Is it branded to your company colors and logo? Is it optimized for mobile? Does your website appear as the top search result when you Google various MSP-service-related phrases? If the answer to any of these questions is no, you should get started redesigning your website and adding more content to it that includes keywords that your target audience is likely searching for. 

• A Company Blog: One of the easiest ways to jump up your search engine ranking and improve your local SEO is to start a company blog and write about topics related to your service offerings and general technology-related news that affect small business. This can help ease a prospect’s mind about working with your company because it shows that you know what you’re talking about. 

• Social Media: Social media is an easy place to start because it’s free to set up accounts with the major platforms you should be on: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Make sure you professionally brand your social media channels to your company and carefully manage your pages so no client who reaches out to you through here is ignored. Then, work yourself up to posting a variety of content to these pages, and link back to your website when applicable.

Once you do this, you should branch into other additional marketing efforts where you’re actively trying to target prospects instead of waiting for them to come to you.

Turning Things Around

If you’re trying to recover from failures in regards to your marketing, you need to first identify where your shortcomings are specifically. Do you excel in email marketing but fall behind with social media marketing? Are your postcards too generic? Are you failing to get people to your website that receive your marketing materials? Do you struggle to run campaigns? Or, market consistently throughout the year? If you need a better idea of what you should be looking at, download our checklist.

To even figure out where your failures are, it’s important to incorporate ways to measure the ROI from your marketing efforts. If you didn’t do that with your past marketing efforts, make sure you plan to for all upcoming campaigns and strategies. Check out our Understanding Metrics blog series for ideas on what you should be tracking.

The Easiest Way to Fix It All…

...is to have a plan. This involves analyzing your own company and current marketing practices (or, lack thereof) as a whole, and as a comparison to your competition. But this can be hard to do due to your own personal biases you likely have as an owner or employee. So, why not have us look at your company for an outside, unbiased perspective?

We do this - and more - with our Marketing Plan service, and create a custom marketing plan designed to fit your current state, and your goals you are looking to achieve. We can also help you fulfill any of the marketing strategies we suggest that you do through many of our other services. Contact us today to get started!