How to Streamline Your Marketing Process
Before the age of the internet, marketing was limited to word of mouth and physical advertisements. However, these past advertising strategies have now been dwarfed by the effectiveness of numerous digital avenues. If you are overwhelmed by all the ways in which you can try to promote your business, you are not alone. There are several ways to streamline your marketing process by breaking down and examining your current methods, recognizing significant channels that you may be underutilizing, and simplifying your existing workflows. This can be done to avoid more minor mistakes, delays, build momentum, and increase effectiveness, productivity, and quality.
Establish Reasonable Objectives and Goals
In marketing, the first step should be to outline what you want to achieve. For instance, what are the key performance indicators of marketing achievement in your company? Although these can differ depending on your various channels like social media marketing platforms, some common marketing objectives include:
- Converting sales
- Promoting products
- Advancing your brand recognition
- Addressing customer response
- Increase traffic on your website
Whatever your exact marketing goals are, you must start by establishing achievable objectives from the beginning to provide you with clear goals to advance toward.
Create Strategies for Your Team
Secondly, structure the marketing process. This is vital for internal teamwork and cooperation. Consider forming communal resources for these marketing areas:
- Content creation rules and endorsement processes to uphold consistency in the branded content
- Tone and voice guidelines for the brand on all your marketing platforms
- Official organization-wide punctuation and grammar guidelines
By making this information available, you will equip workers, avoid spending excessive time editing and standardize the work.
Launch a Marketing Plan and Communal Workspace
Whether you are by yourself or working with a marketing team, it is vital to have a plan to keep you in check. With the multitude of diverse marketing strategies available, having a collective plan to guide everything and help keep track of progress when approaching deadlines fosters smooth business operations. You can use Select Communications telecom consulting or use Google Calendar to store your marketing plan in an accessible place for all team members involved.
Additionally, it is vital to create a central remote workstation for your marketing content as it is being generated. Channels such as Asana and Trello are ideal for this practice because they integrate deadlines, organize workflows, and share files. They are easy and free to use.
Select Your Marketing Platform Wisely
Another way to streamline your marketing is to be careful about the marketing channels you implement. Every company and consumer base has its desires, and it is imperative to carry out market research to determine what platforms your clientele prefers. Here are some of the common marketing platforms:
Conventional Marketing: It integrates everything such as radio, television, billboards, and print ads. Although expensive, it can be a unique way to reach consumers in local markets.
Social Media: From Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and other unique channels such as Snapchat, and WhatsApp, social media platforms offer great ways to interact and reach various consumer demographics.
Website: An e-commerce website with a business blog and quality content is an excellent way to generate consumer leads and increases traffic to bolster your business’s credibility.
Email: A carefully crafted email list provides you with direct access to a consumer base ready to read your message.
Invest your time to research your competitors, customer expectations, and market. Then select the marketing channels which will generate excellent results with the least effort. This will help you evade spending effort and resources in areas not worthy of investment.
Outsource, Automate, and Delegate When Possible
You can also streamline parts of your marketing strategy by delegating to others. This can be achieved in various ways:
Outsource: If you do not know how to get a particular marketing errand done perfectly, you can decide to outsource. Employing a marketing agency or a freelancer provides you with professional services.
Delegate: If you are lucky to have employees, you may opt to delegate some marketing items—responsibilities such as creating general content for your blog or posting daily on social media platforms.
Automate: From content creation to lead conversion and generation, several marketing procedures can be automated.
Whether you are outsourcing, automating, or delegating, all three methods offer a quick way to ease your marketing load.
Final Thoughts
From establishing your marketing goals, creating strategies, choosing your marketing channels, and distributing the workload, there are various ways for your business to streamline its marketing processes.
The critical factor is to simplify things. It is easy for your small business to ignore marketing as you focus on customer service, product development, payroll, and several other tasks. However, it is essential to promote your business since a great product or service is not always enough to avoid falling sales and nurture future success.
5 Strategies To Optimize All Processes In Your Small Business In 2021
COVID-19 did a lot of damage to the business world. Big business suffered unpleasant setbacks, but it was ultimately small businesses that were hit hardest of all. Many companies didn't have the resources to absorb the economic impact of lockdowns and other such complications. Those businesses are now insolvent and gone.
The ones that didn’t perish were in for a bumpy ride. A year or so after the crisis began and the lockdowns hit, we’re still not out of the woods. Competition is fiercer than ever, and SMEs in particular need to be on their toes if they don’t want to fall by the wayside.
For a small business, the only way to stay ahead of the competition is to be as efficient as possible. This means constantly optimizing your business processes so that you can get the most out of the limited resources you have. Implementing a BPM software is crucial for managing your team and business as effectively as possible.
There are essential steps every company should consider to improve its business processes. Here are the best strategies to put your company on the fast track to success.
Organize Your Physical Space
There are many practices you need to adopt to improve your success as an entrepreneur. The first one is to get your “house” in order. Organize your physical office and storage space. Arrange and put away the cables that support your IT workstations. Sort through and file all the paperwork you have.
Sure, there are plenty of other things that you can do to optimize your business processes. Most of them can seem to be more sophisticated and practical. However, the fact remains that clutter and chaos are a productivity killer. When a job is urgent, you usually need to get to it right away. Having to clean up before you can even start on the task at hand will put a spanner in your works.
Don’t Neglect Marketing
Running a successful SME is all about compromise. Often, you won't have the resources to cover every base and constantly gain ground on every front. It’s all about running a tight ship and making the best you can with what you have. As such, it may be tempting to cut corners here and there - especially in a time of crisis.
Still, whatever you do, do not sacrifice marketing. In the current day and age, visibility is everything. Reducing your visibility in such a climate is tantamount to shooting yourself in the foot - twice.
Even if you’re displeased with the results of your marketing efforts so far, don’t cut them short. Instead, diversify your vectors of approach. Focus on promoting your brand on social media. Dip your toe into influencer marketing. Explore the possibility of wider audiences and new communities that may like your product.
Do everything you can to make sure you stay relevant in people’s minds. You’re immediately going to lose vital ground to your competitors if you don’t.
Go Digital
Going digital is an excellent way of speeding up the pace of your business. Sticking all your paperwork on the cloud is a great way to both store your information securely and make it shareable. But that’s only one way of making use of IT to improve your process.
Automating your workflow and using templates to aid your process whenever possible are also a must. It’s remarkable how much more efficient you can be if you use the right digital tools.
You may need a BPM, a video conference software, a CRM tool, or another tool that automates mundane everyday tasks and projects with set deadlines. Make no mistake - the right tools for the job are out there. You just have to find them.
To this end, make it a point to dedicate time to researching how technology can make your business more effective. Take a close look at every part of your process. Do some research on how you can digitize it - and then take steps to implement these tech innovations.
Adopt a Good Task Management System
Getting task management right is essential for running a successful business. Implementing a good BPM solution or adopting software that incorporates task management in some way can help you a lot in that.
The foundation of improving efficiency is clarity. You need to establish what everyone’s tasks are, what every task that needs doing is, what your goals and priorities are.
Categorize and clearly outline everything, and make sure everyone on board knows what’s going on. Doing this without employing a specialized tool can be a bother, even if you are running an SME.
Theoretically, everyone in a small team should be able to keep tabs on all current activities and plans. In practice, everyone has far too much to do to keep the business running. You need to adopt a system that allows everyone to check every aspect of your business easily.
Maintain Your Momentum
You can't afford to get complacent once you put these strategies into motion - you need to keep going. Cleaning up is not something you do once and for all. You need to establish a system to keep the clutter out of your office, storage, and working space.
The same goes for adopting digital tools. You should always be on the lookout for new ways of using technology to improve your business process. Automation will open valuable time that you can spend on more productivity or advancement. As such, it is the key to your success.
Likewise, marketing is not something you do once and for all and forget about. Watch out for what's new, popular, and effective. True, keeping up with what’s hip nowadays is a lot of work. Unfortunately, that’s the only way to stay relevant.
Business process management is an ongoing process by default. However, sometimes it’s not enough just to keep using the old system. If you need more than it can deliver, you should seriously consider changing it with a new one that better suits your needs. Failing that, you can think about supplementing it with additional systems. Investing precious time and effort into that may seem wasteful, but if it can improve your business the expenditure may well be worth it.