The small marketing teams we work with all have the same problem: time. It’s impossible to do it all, but in today’s world, you kinda have to: inbound, outbound, social, experiential, trade shows, content, blah b’blah b’blah. And every day, the list grows because every day there’s a new way to get the message out. Keeping up during the day is what’s keeping them up at night — mostly because they don’t leave the office.
So how does a marketing team of one or two stay ahead? By doing these four things:
Setting SMART goals
SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Agreed-upon, Realistic and Timely. And doing anything else will put you in hot water with everyone else in the company. Let’s look at them in reverse order.
Timely’s important because it’ll keep the momentum of your efforts going. If you don’t give yourself hard deadlines, you’ll push everything off. Timely will also keep your organized, which, if you’re running lean, is so hard to do especially with everything you have to juggle.
Realistic keeps you from promising the moon and only delivering a few clouds. They key here is to know what’s possible in a given timeframe. This’ll be different for every marketing team depending on their size, experience and contacts, but the approach should be the same: don’t promise anything you can’t deliver.
Agreed-upon is the CYA portion of SMART goals. Once you get organizational buy-in, no one can come back and accuse you of under-delivering — unless, of course, you do, which shouldn’t happen if you stick to timely and realistic.
Measurable gives you a target to strive for. Without it, you’re just firing arrows in the air and hoping for a bullseye.
Smart comes from having time to sit down and think about things. Which is the one thing you don’t have. This leads us to the second thing all small marketing teams should do.
Making the most of free social media
Small marketing teams are usually saddled with small budgets. Sound familiar? It should. According to the Wall Street Journal, the average company spends 7.5% of their revenue on marketing. Once you factor in salaries, that doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room for anything else.
In this way, social media can be your best friend if you use it right. This means offering clever, thought-provoking content on a regular basis. Does this mean you have to blow your brains out on every social media channel out there? No! In fact, the opposite is true. You want to pick one or two channels that make sense for the audience you’re targeting and kill it. Spreading yourself too thin will lead you back to the “no time” conundrum you’re trying to avoid.
In the interests of time, you’ll also want to schedule your posts in advance so you’re not scrambling for something to share. Booking a block of time every week to do it will save you a ton of time throughout the week.
Before you pick your channels, it’s important to know what channels your ideal customer frequents. And they may not be the most popular ones. That’s okay. Twitter’s not for everyone. And if it’s not for you or your customers, don’t waste your time on it, especially since best practice is tweeting 10 to 15 times a day.
Once you pick your channels, get to know everything about them: how they work, how people on them like to be engaged and spoken to, and how to get your content out there organically. The most successful social marketing isn’t about outspending — it’s about outsmarting.
Thinking about problems
It’s easy to market the solutions your company offers. You know them like the back of your hand, you can recite them to anyone who asks. But unless you present a problem your ideal customer can relate to, presenting the solution is a waste of your time.
And problems evolve over time, even for the same customer. In our case, for example, our editing service used to exclusively solve the “I don’t want to have to spend money reprinting misspelled materials” problem. It since evolved into “I have so much content to pump out that I don’t know if any of its good anymore” problem.
The only way you’re really going to know your customers’ problems is to ask them. We suggest bi-annual check-ins. Literally ask them what’s causing their hair to turn grey. We do it all the time and our clients are more than happy to tell us.
Knowing what you don’t have on your team and outsourcing it
Even the marketing teams at billion-dollar agencies farm out their work — mostly to hot-shot ad agencies. But if you’re a small team at a small to midsize business, you probably can’t afford the big boys’ price tags. Fortunately, the streets (and the Internet) are lined with small, specialized companies that can do what you don’t do. We’re a good example of that. Our clients hire us to write what they don’t have time to write, edit what they barely had time to write so it doesn’t feel rushed through, and translate what needs to be translated because they don’t speak French. The benefit of looking outside is both qualitative AND quantitative: the work gets done by experts in their field and you have more time to do what’s actually part of your job description.