You’re a Small Business, But Not For Long Thanks to Marketing

That’s why today’s article is about offering three very simple marketing strategies for growing your small business.

1. Focus your budget on advertising.

Most business owners view a marketing budget as a line item in their profit and loss, and therefore, view marketing expenses as an annual expense. Instead, think about marketing cost in terms of client acquisition. In other words: “I'm paying $X for one new client”. This is a scalable and more accountable way of thinking about marketing. As long as that client spends enough with your business to justify the cost of acquiring them, you simple need to rinse and repeat.

So, where should the dollars be spent? Make sure the majority of your marketing spend is on advertising, such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads. Once you’ve established the cost of acquiring a profitable client, there is really no reason to not spend heavy on advertising. Two caveats to add to this though...

• Firstly, if you don’t have a high performing website, this will reduce the percentage of enquiries you receive, and therefore may be worth getting sorted upfront.
• Secondly, there are other long-term growth strategies (like Search Engine Optimisation) which can be achieved without ad spend. However this may be best left until after you’ve established short-term marketing strategies (like Google Ads). It really depends on how much of a rush you’re in.

2. Choose the right person to manage your ads.

Whether you manage your paid advertising yourself, have a staff member do it, or outsource to a marketing agency (like us), you need choose someone with the capacity to continually be check and optimise your campaigns. To maximise your campaign, they should be doing this every couple of days. Unlike more traditional forms of advertising, Digital Ads have an extraordinary amount of analytics, and with them, opportunities for optimisation.

You may have heard the phrase ‘set and forget’. This is the practise of creating ad campaigns without any ongoing review, and is the antithesis of great performing digital marketing. You want someone who is enthusiastic and motivated to get you best results — someone who isn’t going to get distracted by other competing priorities. Often, this level of attention and care produces better results than experience on a resume. Likewise, the accountability of outsourcing to an agency means the person working on your account is focused on improving the results, because they'll want to retain you as a client.

3. Utilise automation technologies.

It’s no secret that technology is changing the way we work. I’m sure it’s true of every industry and workplace, however it is definitely true when it comes to digital marketing! The tools being used are primarily digital (Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Instagram Ads, Facebook Ads) and impressive technology in their own rights.

'Automation' is the latest category of technologies on top of these, which can help improve and safeguard the performance of digital advertising. There are literally hundreds of tools that can be leveraged, such as analytics, click fraud protection, campaign optimisation, search engine optimisation, screen recordings, heat maps, click funnels — the list goes on.

These tools can be setup to run seamlessly in the background and do the heavy lifting, so you don’t have to. You may be surprised to know a standard Helium client get’s access to almost $1,000 worth of marketing tech through our Marketing Essentials service. We're able to do because, as an agency, we get wholesale prices and pass the savings onto our clients. Marketing Essentials give you the tools that make your campaigns stand out from the crowd.