Small Business Marketing as The Economy Recovers

As the economy starts to recover, small businesses need to find new and more efficient ways to get their message to consumers in order to grow the business without dipping too deeply into marketing funds. If you have a marketing plan my best advice to you is to revisit it and re-think how you’re promoting your business. Yellow pages and print ads are expensive and can’t target the demographics as specifically as on-line options. Today you would be prudent to narrow the focus and keep closer records on your return on marketing investment (ROMI). Technology offers many options to reach your target market which until now were unavailable to most small businesses. The benefit of using web technology is you can track specific details on who is accessing your information, allowing you the opportunity to follow up and promote your brand or products. Additionally, if you see something that is not working as well as you would like, you can instantly change or stop your promotion and ad spend.

Content is king, make sure you’re blogging, e-mailing, sending out press releases, and using news articles. Social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, allow you to instantly and inexpensively bring your message to a large group within your demographic. Recently a new breed of on-line marketing and sales tools have become available that is consolidating the management of your web site, blog, social media and sales force. This new breed of marketing and sales tools are starting to emerge to handle the move to from a static web site to an interactive web site were you are able to see how your company is performing on all on line and off line fronts so, you can modify you marketing and sales campaigns instantly. I have found an excellent product called Knovila that will handle this and I feel it’s worth a good look.

So, in closing make sure you’re marketing and sales teams are in sync with your off line and on line marketing efforts allowing leads to be instantly passed to your sales force for immediate follow up. Before you make decisions on any of the options available to you, take the time to educate yourself on what’s available to you on line; search the internet and check your competitor's sites. Small businesses that thrive through this difficult time will be those who do their homework and stay abreast of the new options available to them.

This article was written by Joe Mediate Business consultants providing Executive Sales, Marketing knowledge & leadership to small to medium size companies looking to define their sales strategy and implement a marketing plan to increase their companies’ market exposure and generate additional sales dollars.

Interim CMO the Next Big Trend in Marketing

For most small to medium size companies the need for a strategic marketing plan and a roadmap for execution are more important now then it has ever been in the past. The fact is what’s happening to the marketing world is the breadth of marketing has grown so wide, and companies needs are changing so quickly, if you’re a smaller company, you can’t afford to have all that expertise on staff.
As the economy moves into recovery the need to market your company has becoming a necessity just to stay in business and couple this with all of the cutbacks that every business has endured over the last 24 months. The Chief Marketing Officer is the one leadership resource that will save companies at a time when they need sales growth and profitability the most.

Which leads me to the most important part, how are we going to control and understand all of the new ways to market as we move from a traditional marketing environment to an online one? Should I invest in social networking, pay per click, e-mail marketing, facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, blogs, mobile marketing, or personal URL’s. So, what do I do.

I see a new trend happening in the marketing space and I’m calling them interim CMO’s or CMO’s for hire. Top caliber executives who have started and sold companies or have been a Chief Marketing Officer for a corporation. They will work on a project or fractional bases to help start a companies marketing program. This allows anyone to hire executive marketing talent for only one to ten days per month giving smaller companies an advantage they never had in the past. It all comes down to big time marketing results for less money. This solves the need for marketing strategy, planning and product innovation at a cost that is easily affordable allowing companies to continue their growth path by investing in an area historically only served at a tactical level.

Never before has a company been able to get a ‘rock star’ CMO for a fraction of the cost to hire one on full-time. With the interim approach you get a talented CMO with the experience to move your business forward. Utilizing your vision and business plan to deliver a strategic, measurable marketing plan.

Contact - Joe Mediate for details on how to hire him as an Interim CMO.