Avoid the Stress of Marketing Your Local Business

When you’re part of a local business, you wear many hats. Owners often double as salesmen, admin assistants act as HR, and when there’s a ringing phone, anyone who is available picks it up. It’s just the nature of how small businesses work.

If you’re in charge of the marketing efforts for your small business, there’s a good chance that’s not the only thing on your plate. So how do you juggle it, along with your other responsibilities? Marketing is an ongoing task that will take up your time and energy, so it can quickly become overwhelming.

Let’s get the easy solution out in front first. If you or your staff are overwhelmed with the tasks of marketing your small business, consider hiring a professional to help you.

Before you balk at the idea of working with a professional marketing team, remember not all marketing firms are the same. Here’s at Locallogy, we’re experts at helping small, local businesses because we are a small business. We understand the goals and the challenges, so we’re perfectly suited to help businesses who are just like us.

If you decide to team up with a professional marketing firm, select one that has experience helping small businesses and understands your marketing goals. Most of all, choose a team that appreciates your company’s mission and values.

Forgoing the professional option and handling your marketing in-house is totally doable. But it’s easy to become inundated with recurring marketing tasks, developing new strategies, and trying to keep track of ROI.

Here are a few things you can do to avoid being buried under your marketing to-do list.

It’s difficult to market your business if it doesn’t have a defined brand identity. Your branding and messaging let’s people know who you are, what you do, and importantly, what you stand for.

Branding is not just deciding which font you want to use in your online communications or what color your logo should be (although that’s part of it.) Rather , branding is building your entire presence, from the way you communicate in your ads to the way you handle customer service , even t he way you treat your employees.

Meet with others in your organization and work out the message you want to convey as a company. Once you have a clear idea in mind, get it on paper and make if offici al.

Now, with a confirmed brand and a set message to share, you can focus on building your marketing strategy .

It’s pretty hard to do any sort of marketing if you don’t have set goals in mind. What would be the point? Without goals, you can’t measure results.

Before you dive head first into building a marketing strategy, make a list of goals and desired outcomes. This list should be specific.

“Get more customers” is a goal we often hear from our clients. While this is obviously a valid goal, it’s pretty vague. Will you consider your marketing successful if you get only one new client? Probably not.

Instead, give yourself a specific goal to achieve and attach a time frame , like “get XX new customers over the next XX months.”

This allows you to build a marketing strategy aimed at a real goal that you can measure and track .

These days, there are many applications available to automate various aspects of the marketing process . These apps can really help in freeing up your time to focus on other areas of your business.

Tools like Marketo can help with lead management, MailChimp can help with email marketing, and AdRoll can help with branding. And these are just a few in a sea of many.

When it comes to marketing via your website, tools like Locallogy’s Review Builder helps attract new customers by collating and displaying your company’s reviews.

Consider which tasks are taking up the bulk of your time and seek our applications that can help you manage those.

It’s easy to get swamped with all the tasks that go into marketing. Even worse, trying to keep track of results and ROI can be totally overwhelming. Keep in mind, marketing is an ongoing process. What’s working great one day may not perform very well the next. And that’s okay.

Avoid feeling anxious and getting bogged down in the details of day-to-day performance. Rather, keep an eye on trends and over-all results. This will not only save your sanity but it will also help you know how to better plan your next marketing campaign.