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When you’re leading marketing activities for a small business, it can be hard to know where you should focus your efforts.

You know you need to search-engine optimise your website and build a bullet-proof social media strategy. But you also need to put together the right set of marketing tools,   identify the right metrics, and start designing beautifully persuasive email nurture campaigns.

All of this needs to happen with your (likely) very limited time and resources.

Understanding what to prioritise can make your life a lot less stressful – and help you deliver huge results, that belie the size of your department.

At Salesforce World Tour London 2019, Clementina Angelino – Product Marketing Manager for Pardot, our B2B Marketing Automation solution – shared her recommendations for marketers with small teams who want to make a big impact…

 

1. Prioritise Data-driven SEO

When budgets are tight, SEO is a great starting point, as many of the tools you’ll need are free. Here’s a quick list of key tasks:

  • Do your keyword research. Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal customer, and imagine what they would type to find your business online. There’s a lot of helpful tools out there to get you started, like Google Suggest, Moz Keyword Explorer, KeywordTool.io and SEMrush..
  • Check your domain authority. You want to know how highly you’re currently likely to rank in searches, so you’ve a benchmark for SEO efforts. Again, some of the tools we’ve mentioned above can help track your authority over time.
  • Make your website machine readable. That means ensuring you’ve intuitive top navigation, and an organized footer. It also means performing simple on-page optimisation – making proper use of title tags, meta-descriptions, H1 and H2 headers, URL structure, and links.

SEO mastery is a fairly rare skill in a marketer. If you can find someone who’s able to help you whip your web presence – and more general small business online marketing efforts – into shape, don’t let them go without a fight.

 

2. Prioritise Email Marketing

Before you can start nurturing leads, you need to build out your customer personas. This is a lot easier if all your customer data is in one place – so, if you haven’t already, now is the time to develop connected sales and marketing systems. 

You’ll also want to talk to your Sales, Product and Data Science teams (if you’re lucky enough to have them) about what most often causes prospects to convert. Now you have a good idea of who you’re targeting, what you want them to do and a single source of truth for data, it’s time to develop the emails you’ll use to move your prospects down the funnel.

Take advantage of small business marketing automation and small business email marketing tools to send prospects on different email nurture journeys depending on their job role, interests, or behaviour – for example, if they’ve already opened an email on a particular subject.

 

3. Prioritise Marketing Analytics

When your resources are limited, measuring their impact is even more critical.

You’ll want to use Google Analytics to understand who’s interacting with your site – and how they’re doing it. Reviewing your traffic sources could help you understand, for example, whether your paid social media campaign is delivering ROI, or whether the effort you’ve put into SEO is paying off.

More generally, you should be striving to measure your marketing’s impact through a broad range of metrics:

  • Cost per acquisition
  • Individual channel cost per acquisition
  • Trial sign-ups
  • Newsletter sign-ups
  • MQLs -> SQLs
  • $ of pipe/revenue
  • Average deal size
  • Lifetime value of a customer
  • % of product usage

As you build up your stack of marketing technologies, it can be useful to think in terms of absolute essentials, and enhancements you’ll want to consider including over time. Here’s a quick breakdown:

Stack Essentials

  • CRM
  • Marketing Automation
  • Basic Analytics Tools
  • Spreadsheet

Stack Enhancements

  • Advanced Analytics Tools
  • A/B Testing Tools
  • Attribution tools
  • Third-Party Intelligence

 

#4. Optimize Your Acquisition Tactics

Do most of your customers find you through web searches? Or perhaps they come to you through industry events? Or your beautifully targeted online advertising programme?

Identifying how your customers discover your organisation will help you make smarter decisions about where to spend your budget. 

As a general rule, you’ll want to optimise your inbound marketing tactics (think your website, SEO and nurture efforts) before you spend on outbound. When you do move onto outbound, email marketing and paid social tend to be the natural place to start.

Smaller businesses, if they are to survive and thrive, need to deliver big results from their marketing strategies. Join our webinar to find out how you can do exactly that.