Tips for the One Man Marketing Department

As a small business, or a one man (or woman) show, marketing can be down right difficult to tackle. Where do you start? What would a realistic marketing plan be? How can you get the most out of your time? These are all questions that small businesses face. Here’s how to rock it out as a one person marketing department.

Set Realistic Expectations

We’ll just throw this out there – you’re not going to have the capabilities of Proctor & Gamble when it comes to your marketing efforts. It’s great to set high standards, just make sure that they’re obtainable. When you’re a one person show, what you can and can not accomplish is really black and white – how many hours in the week do you have available to set aside for marketing and what skills do you posses to execute against your marketing goals. Especially as you grow, the problem becomes that you don’t have the time or expertise to hit your goals and that’s when it’s time to reach out for help.

Discover Your Buyer Personas

Not only will your buyer personas help you communicate effectively with your targeted buyer, it makes marketing easier and much more efficient. When you have a buyer persona put together, the time and effort that you put in to crafting awesome marketing content drops because you’re familiar with that buyer, you know how to talk to them, and what forms of communication you’ll utilize to grab their attention. If you’re in need of some help in drafting your buyer personas, or even finding out what the heck they are, check out this past article detailing it all.

Focus, Focus, Focus

Don’t spend your time working on marketing initiatives that don’t pay off – work on those that do or have the potential to. Case and point, social media. Social media is one of the biggest pit-falls of one man marketing departments because it can be time consuming and people have the belief that they need to be actively engaged on EVERY social media platform out there. Yeah, in a perfect world you’d have a strong presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and whatever other channel you’ve identified, but the reality is that you may just not have the time. If LinkedIn is pulling in a great amount of traffic and new leads, but Twitter isn’t, awesome. Take some focus off of Twitter and shift it over to LinkedIn to capitalize more on what’s happening there. Take a look at what your winners are and focus your attention there.

Create the Ever-Green Effect

Creating new material is super time consuming – writing, designing, editing, publishing, etc. Instead of having to create every thing from scratch, build a foundation of collateral that you can pull from that’s “ever-green”. Create things that stay relevant for a long period of time, or that you can recycle the next year, that you can utilize over and over again. Then, you can supplement those pieces with new, fresh, topical pieces that will help fill out the conversation or campaign.

Don’t Forget Calls to Action

Always remember that you’re focus is on filling a pipeline and moving people through a sales funnel. And one big key to doing that is by having clear calls to action throughout your marketing efforts. People want to know what to do next – tell them what that is. If they’re on your blog, what’s the next step? If they’re reading an email, what’s the next step? If they met you at a trade show, what’s the next step? You get the picture. Just keep in mind your buyer personas and what stage of the sales cycle they’ll be in while you’re crafting them to pack that ultimate punch.

Automation is Your Friend

The more that you can push off on technology, the better, and here’s why – it makes your life easier. Instead of having to squeeze in time to get an email out to a new lead, your systems do it for you. Instead of manually nurturing a group of leads, your systems do it for you. You’re saving time and your marketing is automatically working leads through the sales funnel for you. Pretty darn cool.