Small to mid-size businesses often need assistance when it comes to marketing. Building brand awareness and generating more new business opportunities can be a significant challenge for these companies because they may not have the tools or experienced marketing resources to create and execute a consistent marketing plan.

Marketing is a contest to get people’s attention.  Every company has a story to tell and the key to successful selling is to be able to tell your story to more people more often, but this is no easy task.  It’s a full-time job that consists of daily, weekly, and monthly activities designed to build brand recognition and top of mind awareness. Your first objective is to fully understand who your target audience is, and how you can tell your story to them. If you are selling to your existing customers, well that’s easy. But we are talking about generating new business which means you need to acquire a list of several thousand prospects to contact via bulk e-mail campaigns or outbound telemarketing.  Do you have this list or know how to acquire it? Once you have the list, do you have a system to store and manage the activities associated with the list?

Now that you have a list of prospects, how do you plan to communicate your message to this target audience; Google or Yahoo pay-per-click, banner advertisements, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or perhaps bulk e-mail marketing.  Who is going to create the marketing materials for you, the banner advertisements, or e-mail templates for example?  This requires a level of expertise that many small to mid-size businesses do not have. Lastly, how do you plan to monitor what is working for you and what is not? Do you have a system in place for removing prospects that have no interest or have asked to unsubscribe? More importantly, do you have a process in place that enables your sales team to follow-up on those prospects that have expressed an interest in your products and services?  A CRM system can address this requirement.

I think we have clearly established that building and executing a consistent marketing program requires marketing automation tools and experienced marketing resources. If you have these tools and resources in place then there would be no need to outsource these services, but if you do not then you have two choices; do nothing or engage the services of a third party that can fill the gap and act as your in-house marketing team.

There are several companies that offer outsourced marketing services. One of the best is Commence Corporation. Commence is a CRM and Marketing Automation company that has coupled their marketing automation tools with a team of experienced marketing professionals.  The team provides a full service that includes fine-tuning your value proposition, acquiring a prospect list, building and distributing marketing templates, and providing a platform for measuring campaigns performance. New leads are even assigned points based on their behavior. Two points if they opened the campaign, three points if they filled out a form requesting additional information or a free giveaway, and five points if they asked to schedule a call with a company representative. Commence also offers content creation and distribution on social sites if required. The bottom line is simple. If you have the resources to build and execute a consistent marketing plan, then hats off to you.  Take advantage of this resource and focus on building brand recognition as this will lead to the generation of more new business opportunities. If you do not have the tools or expertise, you must engage a third party. Doing nothing is not an option for your business.