Having worked with dozens of busy SME business owners we know how hard it can be to decide where to focus limited resources, and the digital marketing landscape can be daunting even for those who have a good handle on fundamental marketing principles and know their audience well. It is crucial to prioritise marketing activities that offer the highest return on investment, enhance your brand profile, and align with your business goals, but where to start...
A structured approach and bite-sized activities can really help. If you try to do it all, especially if you’re doing it all on your own(!), you may find your efforts are in vain as audience engagement remains low, traffic to your website plateaus, (or even dips!), and your search engine results page positions don’t improve. Focusing on what you can do well, using time-saving tools and a pragmatic approach, will be more effective in the long run than trying to take on too much and do it all!
Here are JAB’s first three top tips to help busy SMEs to strategise and prioritise their marketing activities.
1 – Understand Your Audience
Firstly, and most importantly, Understand Your Audience. Clearly define who your customers are, what their needs are, where they live, what sort of jobs they work in and income, education, who influences them, where they spend the majority of their time online, and other demographic information such as age and sex. To manage this process effectively, it’s helpful to create detailed profiles of your ideal customers, which can help you to identify customer pain points and segment your audience, and will enable you to tailor your marketing messages effectively to ensure your limited time and resources are spent attracting the right customers for your products or services. Market leading email marketing platform Mailchimp has audience persona templates available.
2 – Analyse the Market
As an extension of understanding your audience, it’s also vital to Analyse the Market. Even well-established businesses with a full order book or vast client list can benefit from spending some time, on a semi-regular basis, to analyse any changes in the market that could affect their audience behaviours. These could include new competitors, superior or more attractive offers, disruptors that are changing behaviours, economic conditions, seasonality, political or cultural changes, environmental factors, technological changes and many others. Regular SWOT analysis can help you keep a track of these factors and monitor how they might affect your business. Leading CRM platform, Hubspot, offers a useful, free, SWOT analysis template.
3 – Set Clear Goals
Once you know who your audience is and have a good idea how they behave online and offline, as well as the market conditions and perceptions that affect your audiences, your brand, and your products and services, it’s time to Set Clear Goals.
Your marketing activity goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Your business’ SMART objectives will be specific to your business and your short, medium and long-term goals, but could include; increasing website traffic, ranking higher in search engines, boosting social media engagement or building your audience numbers, growing your brand awareness or improving your brand reputation, increasing your email open rates, improving conversion rates, or improving your customer retention.
Whatever you decide to focus on first, which should be the activities you are confident will help you meet your goals in a manageable way and provide you with the best return on investment, (including when that investment is your time), it is essential to plan your activities and track the progress of your SMART goals. Mailchimp has a great article on setting SMART goals for your business.
In our next article, we’ll talk about the marketing activities SME business owner should prioritise in order to drive their business forward through effective marketing strategies.
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"Our work with Helen has revealed her marketing insight. Beyond the tactics of putting marketing communications in place for awareness and leads, Helen understands the role marketing can play in strategically supporting a business to achieve its objectives."
Rob Harrison, Director, Glued Ltd.
Posted on August 24th 2024
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