Marketing is one of the most important ongoing tasks you need to do in relation to your business. The trouble is that there’s so much to do, it is easy for a small business owner to become overwhelmed. There are so many marketing methods, it’s impossible to accomplish everything – and to do it well.
This is why, sooner or later, you are going to have to build a high-performance marketing team. There are several steps that can help you accomplish this.
1. Set Your Business Goals
What is most important to you in the next three to six months? More subscribers, sales, brand recognition? Once you’ve set these goals, you can start drawing up action plans for accomplishing them, and hiring the right people to follow through.
2. Assess Yourself as a Marketer
What are you currently doing to market your business? Do you enjoy it, or would you rather do other tasks in your business? If the latter is the case, it’s time to make a list of the tasks you really don’t want to do, so you can find outsourced workers/freelancers to take them over for you. Then you can head to a freelance site like Fiverr.com to see who is available. If you have a larger budget, look for help on Upwork.com or Freelancer.com.
3. Consider Your Current Content Creation Process
Content marketing drives traffic to your site and converts browsers into subscribers and customers. If you’ve been struggling to keep up with content creation for your site or blog, or not creating enough different types of content, it’s time to get some help. You can purchase private label rights (PLR) content inexpensively, acquiring a license to use pre-written content. Then you could rewrite it to customize it for your brand, or hire a freelancer to do it.
You can also hire an article writer for around $5 per 500 words at Fiverr.
Other forms of content that grab attention and are highly shareable include slideshows and video. There are many slideshow specialists who can take your data and transform it into an attractive presentation. If you add transitions and timing between slides, and save as an MP4, you can even turn the deck into a video.
You can hire a talented artist who does whiteboard videos or completely illustrated videos for around $100 per 150 words of scripted content. Many of them use voiceover artists for a really high-quality version of your script. You can also hire voiceover artists yourself directly, male or female, with American, English or Australian accents, for example.
All your content should be optimized for the search engines. SEO can often be outsourced as your site grows larger. If you are not sure of the latest trends that can propel you to the top of Google’s results pages, consider hiring an expert for a short amount of time and learn all you can from them. Track and test their results. If you see an uptick, consider retaining them on a monthly basis.
4. Evaluate Your Social Media Presence
Social media is a great way to get free traffic, but it can become a ten-ring circus with so many existing popular sites and so many newly-emerging ones. The top ones are of course Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Tumblr, but Instagram, Snapchat and Vine are also growing rapidly. Each site has certain rules of the road, so it might be better to hire someone who is already an expert at using Instagram, for example, than struggling to try to learn it all yourself.
5. Assess Each Freelancer’s Skills
Start out small, with a simple task. If they can’t handle it, move on to another freelancer at the interface. Track and test the results and assess how much time you are saving by having them take care of these tasks. You should soon find yourself at the head of a high-performance marketing team that can really move your business forward.
