Let’s face it. Marketing is critical to the health of your business. If you are not generating revenue, it can be difficult to remain in business and if you are expecting growth well forget about it. Despite this, many executives of smaller businesses see marketing as an expense that never ends, and you know what? They are right. Effective marketing does not end. Building brand recognition is all about consistency. Industry experts have documented that your target audience will not recognize your company, your product, or the service you provide unless they are exposed to it nine to ten times. This can be via e-mail campaigns, white papers, magazine articles, billboards, television ads or social media sites like Google, LinkedIn, X or Facebook as examples. If you agree with the above, then you can appreciate that creating an effective marketing strategy for your business needs to include a mix of these items and must be done month after month after month.

The Challenge

Most small businesses have a professionally trained sales manager and one or more sales representatives on board, but traditionally do not have an experienced marketing resource. There are two reasons for this. First, experienced marketing professionals can be difficult to recruit, and they can be too expensive to hire for smaller businesses.  As a result, these businesses are forced to look for someone already on board that has the skills to create a marketing template and periodically send it out to prospects and customers. This is not an effective marketing strategy. There is no consistency here, which is why companies that are doing this are frustrated with the results.  If you can relate to the above, then you have two options.

Option 1. Hire an experienced marketing professional that is dedicated to building, managing, and executing a marketing strategy for your business. If you can afford it, this should be a full-time role whereby they are accountable for the success of the program.

Option 2. Engage the services of a third party that has a staff of marketing professionals who understand content creation and distribution and can help you to define your value proposition; meaning what customers do you serve better than anyone else, how will you communicate this to your target market and how will you convert this effort into new customers.

Third party companies like Commence Corporation, a CRM Software and Marketing Automation firm, offer the value-added services that small businesses often struggle with, such as:

Acquiring a list of 10,000 or more targeted prospects to market to.

Fine-tuning your message and value proposition and creating a series of professional marketing templates tailored to this message.

Distributing the e-mails every other week to the target audience, which ensures consistency and the building of brand recognition.

Generating reports that outline each campaign’s performance including the number of opens and click-throughs to a call to action.

Automatically capturing all new inquiries into your CRM system. Commence includes their CRM system if you do not have one.

The bottom line is this. Many of the executives I speak with are uncomfortable with the best practices in today’s digital marketing environment or may not have the budget to recruit and hire an experienced marketeer. That is ok, services from companies like Commence Corporation are just a fraction of the cost of a single marketing representative and can have a substantial impact on the performance of your business. There is no longer any reason to kick the can down the road. The marketing services that small businesses require are now both available and affordable.

To learn more about the services Commence Corporation provides, contact sales@commence.com or call 877-266-6362.