Marketing Help for Small Businesses: 3 Reasons Why

Marketing Help For Small Businesses

‍‍It can be difficult to market a small business' products or services; whether your company has help in this venture or not can be a game-changer. Often enough, my clients ask me why their small business would benefit from a marketing company's help. 

Well, there are several reasons to join up with a marketing firm. Below, I'll outline the three biggest reasons that a business owner can benefit from outsourcing marketing skills to another company.

A Marketing Company Can Help a Small Business Owner Focus on the Business

Outsourcing marketing tactics like social media management, or content marketing, etc.  to an outside company can be a huge help. A business owner has a lot on their plate. Marketing is just one of them. 

Marketing is an essential aspect of running and promoting your business. However after the marketing plan is finished, a local business owner may want to consider how much he or she wants to be involved in the execution of the plan.

Many marketing strategies and  tactics can be very time-consuming. If the owner is involved deeply in all of them, it can divert his or her attention when it could be better deployed elsewhere. 

This is where a marketing company helps. They can take some of the heavy lifting off your plate. They own developing the fresh marketing ideas on how to reach and convert potential customers. They can also own executing and managing them.

This will require your input and monitoring. A great agency will provide you with a weekly dashboard of important metrics. In addition, they will be able to alert you when metric lag and provide suggestions on how to improve them.

That way, you can focus on running the whole business and not just small parts of it like building word of mouth campaigns, email outreach, etc..

When you market your business on social media by yourself, you might wind up fighting an uphill battle. Dave Nevogt at Hubstaff wrote an article about outsourcing social media management, and it hits on a lot of points that go beyond just social media marketing, social networks, and blog posts. Here are some of the highlights:

• Small business employees will usually only operate their accounts during working hours, even though traffic comes in during outside hours as well.  
• Marketing is about communicating succinctly & clearly. If the communication is rushed, you're unlike to do both. You aren't just selling a product, but you're starting a conversation as well.  
• If you delegate marketing to the wrong people, you could see far weaker results. You need someone who knows and understands how to identify a target market and to communicate with that target audience. 

These three points are relevant to advertising, SEO, email marketing, chatbots, etc. Many of these tasks are highly specialized and require a significant amount of time to learn. Google Adwords, for instance, hundreds of hours of courses.

A specialist can provide the marketing help your small business needs otherwise you are likely to spread you or your staff too thinly. As a result, you may burnout, face turnover, or have weaker results.

Deliver the Best Marketing For Small Business

A small business owner might not have the marketing experience a company can help provide. Most owners started their business to follow a passion, not just to get into the world of marketing. 

But when you hire a small business marketing company to help, you can find the expertise you need and more. 

TribalVision has an excellent post regarding why a small business might look for help from a small business marketing company to support their marketing efforts. They broke down the major categories:

• Expertise – Marketers should know how to properly market your small business and the skills that come from time spent in the marketing world. They can best identify whether online marketing is right for you, whether social media marketing, like Facebook ads, makes sense for you, or how to use local resources like Google My Business, and outline what marketing tools & ideas that will work best.
• Flexibility – a marketing company can change with the times, while a small business might need help adjusting to changes on the day-to-day level.  
• Savings – Instead of spending a little bit on everything to see what works, a marketing company knows where the money is best used, for example which social media platforms have the best return on investment for our industry.

In truth, there are probably more than just these 3 points. However, these three are where I think a small business marketing company can help the most.

Keep Your Marketing Out of Sight but Still in Mind

One of the last major reasons to consider going to an outside company for help in small business marketing is to clean up the clutter. 

While this is related to focusing, it is slightly different. As mentioned above, a small business owner can't do everything alone and remain focused on the bigger picture. But, it's also true that we should not look to set it and forget it. 

There are certain aspects of marketing that should remain in your control and monitoring. As Vanessa Rodriguez Long wrote on the Uhuru Network in an article about in-house and outsourced marketing, there are a few good reasons to keep certain marketing aspects in-house.

First, you own the brand. A great small business marketing company can help you build your brand and help build brand awareness. However, the small business owner is its caretaker.

Second, you need to be aware of what your customers are saying. Marketing is a conversation. Your audience is speaking to you in likes and shares. A great marketing company can help collect and analyze, but only you can make the changes.

Lastly, a marketing firm can help generate leads, but you will need to close them. The best help that a small business marketing company can provide is its specialized staff. As a result, you have access to an expert instead of a single person doing everything.

Plus, and more importantly, it's their knowledge and experience you're looking for. It saves time, money, and frustration by not having to learn everything from scratch.

In Summary…

The three major reasons to consider hiring a marketing company to help your small business are:

• Marketing companies can help you focus on what most important 
• A marketing company has the knowledge you need to succeed. They have specialized skills and experience that can save you time and money. 
• A small business marketing company can help you tremendously if you stay engaged in key parts of the process.  

If your small business needs marketing help, there are plenty of options to consider including ProStrategix.