SMEs often find marketing a challenge. For many marketing becomes an ‘addon’ to the duties of the Sales Manager or others in the business. Even those who have a marketing department often have limited resources and find themselves struggling to achieve everything they think they should be doing.
In this article, we look at five of the most common challenges SMEs report to us when it comes to marketing, along with some top tips for overcoming them.
Challenge 1: Money
Very few companies can afford to spend millions on their marketing but SMEs are often faced with extremely limited budgets for promoting their products and services. Traditional advertising techniques such as print advertising and direct mail can be costly and very difficult to measure in terms of return. Digital marketing overcomes these problems but presents some new ones of its own.
Aside from the cost of creating a professional website, there are many companies offering tools such as email marketing platforms, SEO tools, and social media schedulers, etc. Paying for all these resources on top of any advertising spend can soon eat up any spare cash from the marketing funds.
Overcoming the challenge:
The main solution to this challenge, and to the others, is careful planning. If you have limited money you need to make sure you are spending it on activities that generate returns and this is something you can only find out through analysis and testing. There are lots of cost-saving tips, enough to fill another blog piece, but for now, here are two key ones.
For managing social media and SEO etc., there are plenty of free tools available on the internet. It may take a bit of trial and error to find the right one for you and you’ll certainly have less functionality than you would if you paid for it, but in most cases the free tools are sufficient.
When it comes to PayPerClick (PPC) advertising try targeting longer tail keywords. For example, “buy women’s red shoes size 10” rather than just “women’s shoes”. They’ll produce less traffic but are (usually) cheaper and someone searching on this term is likely to be closer to purchasing so returns can be much higher.
Challenge 2: Time
There is never enough time in the day. Moderns marketers need to plan, do, review and use those findings to influence the next plan. If you’re not doing any of these stages you will be missing out on gaining prospects and sales.
However, in addition to all the traditional channels for advertising and communicating we now have to contend with an almost infinite number of online channels, from email to social media and everything in-between. Finding enough time to market across all of these, and do it well, is an almost impossible task.
Overcoming the challenge:
As with money the secret is in planning and prioritising. Spend your time like money and concentrate on those things that generate the best returns. There’s no point setting up and managing a Snapchat account if your prospects aren’t using that channel. Use free scheduling tools like Hootsuite or Stack to plan ahead. Have some donotdisturb time each day for writing content or doing data-intensive work where you can not be distracted unless it is an absolute emergency.
For each new task arising that isn’t in the plan consider the effort involved, the value it would generate and the consequences of it not being done, before jumping straight into completing it.
Challenge 3: Knowledge
Marketing is a very dynamic world. New technologies and methods are announced daily and theories are now much more complex than the 4Ps that were around in the ‘good old days. Having the knowledge, and the confidence, to use all the online tools available can be a major challenge, particularly if you’re not part of Generation Y.
Overcoming the challenge:
There are many free resources and blogs you can sign up for such as Hubspot or Smart Insights. Make sure you make time each week to actually read them and learn from them, it’s just as critical to your success as all the other things you have to do. Investigate evening courses if you have the time, or try a distance learning course. Alternatively, network with other marketers who’d be happy to act as mentors or just someone to bounce ideas off.
Challenge 4: Measuring Returns
Marketing has traditionally been seen as hard to track. It can be difficult to see the returns gained from the money you’ve spent. Digital has made this task so much easier with a wealth of tools to analyse everything from where your website visitors live to when your Twitter followers are most likely to be looking at their accounts. However, with all this data it’s easy to lose your focus and concentrate on interesting things that don’t really matter rather than those that do.
Data analysis also involves dealing with numbers and maths something that can terrify lots of people. As a result, they avoid doing anything more detailed than a simple overview and run the risk of missing that golden nugget of information that could transform their revenue.
Overcoming the challenge:
When planning, make sure your objectives are SMART so you know exactly what you have to track and measure to determine if efforts are paying off. In most cases, this will be sales revenue and profit, but other measures can include brand engagement on social media or attribution funnels for pay-per-click advertising. Most online tools have excellent help guides and forums so use them.
If maths or Excel is your nightmare find someone in your business who is more comfortable with them and can give you some quick lessons (the finance team are often great for this), or find a local one-day course in your area. External courses cost money but the confidence they can give you in your day-to-day activities will be worth it. You’ll soon find yourself falling in love with Pivot tables and conditional formating.
Challenge 5: Generating more leads
The ultimate aim for most marketers is to target and engage prospects to turn them into actual customers (usually with the help of sales teams). It isn’t just about numbers, marketing needs to create quality leads with the highest potential of a sale to ensure time and money aren’t wasted flogging a dead horse. All customers move through a buying cycle discovery, research, comparison, and purchase, and marketers can face problems at all these points in gaining prospects and moving them along the sales funnel.
Overcoming the challenge: Know your prospects and customers
First, know who you want to buy from you. Base this on previous sales information so you target the most profitable and most convertible prospects and avoid time wasters. Secondly know their triggers what gets their interest and what makes them take action. These are usually pains and problems they face and are seeking a solution for.
Finally, know where they will be hanging out, are they reading the local paper or are they Facebook junkies. All this sort of information forms the basis of personas, one of the best things you can create to help guide your marketing efforts. Once you have all this information you can start developing messaging and content that targets your personas at all stages in their buying cycle and helps move them along the funnel so you generate the maximum number of quality leads.
Converge Group
