AI, SEO, GEO, SEM, PPC etc., etc. These are all the kinds of acronyms that one might find when engaging in the dark arts that is marketing, but the simple fact is that regardless of which techniques you utilize or which work best for your specific industry, the need to not just master the art, but also scale things up as you grow and alongside an expansion is vital. In some ways, it can be a tricky balancing act for smaller operations.
They need to market aggressively existing or new products in order to grow, but costs can rapidly add up if they’re not careful. Fortunately, with the right foundation and understanding of where you need to apply your resources and efforts, it’s possible to create campaigns that perfectly align with your needs and offer the sort of ROI that makes sense.
Building A Modular Strategy As The Foundation
Past performance is no guarantee of future results, and in the world of marketing, what worked a year or so ago might not work today. Now, that’s certainly not always the case, and many tried-and-true techniques still work wonders, but modern marketing campaigns that are designed to push growth and run alongside any business expansion need to be built upon a strong foundation of processes that fit the current zeitgeist.
For some enterprises, this might be outsourcing much of the heavy lifting to companies for which this task is their bread and butter. If that sounds too expensive, bear in mind that you can often use hour-based marketing subscriptions to achieve a great deal of success without having to keep a highly costly marketing agency on retainer each month.
But what if you choose to go it on your own and opt to build a campaign in-house? Well, as stated, you need to base your strategy on what works, as well as some more “out there” concepts that could just help you to gain a bit more traction, if you’re only to focus on the usual options. In practice, a solid foundation might look like this:
- 70% core: These are your proven channels, such as email (an oldie, but a goodie), SEO, and SMM.
- 20% expansion: It can pay to test out new platforms that might pop up, or that already exist, but you’ve never considered. For instance, you might have placed a lot of effort in making long-form videos, but ignored short-form video platforms. By chopping up and reusing parts of your long form and turning them into short videos, you can capture new audiences.
- 10% high risk: This 10% is made up of the very bleeding edge of technology, like AI and emerging social platforms. They are a high-risk, high-reward bet, but just as with using money, you should only use it as a test bed for new ideas and build on whatever small successes you might gain.
Use Technology To Automate What Needs Automating
Yes, we know that you’ve heard about automation a million times before, and yes, we know that you’re probably already using it to some degree. But it always pays to take a step back and see what’s working in this regard, and what you might be able to optimize a bit better.
For instance, investing in a high-quality CRM platform and pairing it with your various channels can help you enormously in discovering new avenues to bot capture new customers and, perhaps even more crucially, nurture existing ones who have already shown an interest in your business while driving sustainable growth for your brand.
Data-Driven Decision Making Is Critical To Successful Strategies And Positive ROIs
If you’ve been smart at the start and collected data as you’ve developed your business, you can use that to build a hugely successful marketing campaign based on what you now actually work (while avoiding the more wasteful aspects of what didn’t). If you failed to collect any data, all is not lost, though, as long as you ensure that you collect everything and anything that can help you to devise new and unique forms of marketing content.
Marketing has always been the weakest part of most businesses since it requires a significant input and understanding of what you want to achieve (which isn’t always as apparent as it might sound). But by building a foundation based on what works, and leveraging various technologies to help you automate the processes, you can grow your company without losing focus on the key drivers of business, which is the business itself.
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