Mess up your marketing and you could do permanent damage to your brand.
It’s no wonder that small businesses say marketing is one of the biggest challenges they face. Marketing demands time, resources, and expertise. Getting it wrong is lost revenue at best, harm to your brand at worst.
That’s why small businesses are turning to managed marketing services to take their marketing to the next level. Below, we’ll take a look at how marketing services can improve your business.
Business Focus
The more time a small company diverts from its core business focus, the slower it grows.
Large companies have the advantage of specialized departments they can call on for specific tasks. But small businesses face the prospect of doing everything themselves. This means diverting vital manpower when it comes to launching a major marketing campaign.
This negatively impacts your business growth. It might even cancel out the positive benefits of your marketing attempts.
Managed marketing services can allow small businesses to outsource their marketing without losing focus. Once you’ve worked together on a plan, your service provider will handle most of the day-to-day concerns. Your employees can then focus on what matters to your business.
Flexibility
Marketing thrives on change and innovation.
The content, scale, and delivery of your campaigns will vary constantly. They can change with the season or target audience. Effective marketing is flexible and tailored to your aims.
Smaller businesses can struggle to adapt quickly. Hiring additional staff for a single marketing campaign can be a time and money sink. You might not even need these extra employees once the campaign is over, which leaves you with some tricky decisions.
Managed marketing can allow you to tailor your operation directly to the needs of your campaign. Managed service providers will discuss your exact aims with you. They can then formulate and deliver a plan using their internal resources.
Expertise
A small business can’t master everything.
Managed marketing services offer a chance for small businesses to fill their knowledge gaps. Without an expert team of marketers, businesses struggle to compete in a crowded marketplace.
Marketing is fickle, and it takes years to learn the most effective marketing techniques. A company trying to go it alone is likely to throw money away on R&D before they even get to running their campaign. Service providers will likely already have experience in your industry.
Expert marketers can also take a holistic look at your brand. Everything from your site to your device readiness can be taken into account. They’ll know to look for things that you might otherwise miss. You can’t correct mistakes you haven’t even thought about, so there’s no substitute for expert advice.
Morale
You can never forget that your employees are people, not machines.
If you’re trying to handle marketing without dedicated staff, you can encounter morale issues. Employees might be working in roles they don’t have experience for. They may not enjoy the job. And it’s possible you’re adding to their workload when you’re in marketing mode.
Managed service providers have dedicated teams to handle their work. They’re career marketers who manage their staffing levels internally. This can offload a lot of the stress your team might experience to a service that’s much more prepared and willing to undertake the job.
Marketing services can keep your employees focused on the aspects of your business that they’re the most positive about.
Cut Costs
Controlling your budget is vital for small-to-medium businesses.
Hiring extra staff to handle a marketing campaign can be costly. Time spent recruiting can result in lost revenue. Salaries, bonuses, and employee benefits will all sap your budget. And the more employees you have, the more HR support you’ll need. You could even outgrow your premises.
Even when you have staff in place, you still need to devote time to research and implement marketing strategies. Analysing previous results and gathering market data are vital to successful marketing.
Unforeseen expenses can also occur. Campaigns run by inexperienced marketers might need sudden adjustments that will add costs.
A managed service can control costs by working with a fixed budget. Adjustments to the budget will be discussed and agreed in advance. Any R&D time will benefit from economies of scale.
Reliability
If you’re using internal staff, something small could bring your entire campaign to a halt.
Unforeseen absences or an employee resignation could derail your marketing efforts. In a worst-case scenario, this could put an end to a marketing campaign while it’s underway. This will likely result in lost returns for the money spent.
Losing key marketing staff could also cause loss of expertise. You may be forced to abandon a marketing campaign entirely.
A single misstep on your campaign could also send you into a tailspin. Marketing blunders can make the news, resulting in damage to your brand. Negative ROI and reputation damage are the two largest results of a mishandled campaign.
Managed marketing services have in-house teams to meet your goals. They’ll be a service agreement in place which requires them to dedicate staff. As your customer, they’ll work closely with you to course correct should anything go wrong.
Sizing Up
Anything that lets a company punch above its weight is a huge advantage in business.
Working with managed marketing could be the key to overtaking larger competitors. Marketing services allow you to tap into the resources and experience of a dedicated team without keeping one in-house.
This gives you an edge against similar-sized competitors who aren’t making use of managed services. But it also lets you compete with larger businesses with an internal marketing team and a larger budget.
That means you can boost your company’s impact without literally growing your company and exposing yourself to risk. Instead of being forced to grow to meet your marketing objectives, you can grow based on the results, instead.
Managed Marketing Solves Problems
Small and medium-sized business constantly struggle against larger companies with more financial clout. Managed marketing is just one of the techniques they can use to level the playing field and enjoy similar advantages.
Be sure to follow our blog for more marketing hints and tips, or contact us to find out how we can help you.
