Top 5 Marketing Challenges for Small Businesses
Being a Small Business comes with all sorts of challenges. Aside from smaller budgets and a smaller scale of operations as opposed to bigger businesses, you’re often on the tools and directly involved in the business the majority of the time. All this leads to a lack of time and perspective, dealing with the day-to-day tasks instead of planning for the future and growth of your business. This affects your ability to carry out marketing among other things. But what other marketing challenges do small businesses face on a day-to-day basis?
1. Lack of Marketing Budget
Lack of budget is a general issue for small businesses but especially for marketing. In the social age, where “marketing” can cost next to nothing, many businesses make the mistake of not setting aside a penny for real marketing activities. Whether that’s investing in an email marketing platform or some monthly ads, a little bit of money spent here and there will dramatically improve your success with marketing. Free Social media posts can only go so far and only feeds your top of funnel, there’s no way of directly nurturing leads and it’s much harder to convert them based off organic social media alone.
2. Inconsistent Marketing efforts
Coming from a lack of time or budget, putting an inconsistent amount of effort into marketing can make the results inconsistent too. Keeping your efforts consistent is important for getting the best results. Forgetting things like ads for a moment, consistent social media is still a great place to start. By posting consistently you can get better reach and engagement from your current followers and start to build your follower count over time. When putting consistent amounts of money into your marketing, you’ll start to see even better results from your paid efforts and unpaid ones too than if you were to put money into them every once in a while.
3. Keeping up to date with relevant marketing trends
As I’ve mentioned previously, small business owners can often have next to no time on their hands after entire days spent on the tools so marketing in general can be difficult to find time for, never mind keeping up to date with relevant marketing trends. Keeping up to date with these trends, however, will give you many more ideas for how you can make the most out of your limited marketing time. Instead of wasting your time on outdated marketing techniques that you already know of, get in on the newest and most effective trends and boost your business’ marketing efforts by simply staying up to date.
4. Limited availability of Content
Let’s be real, we’ve all used this excuse at some point when we’re creating posts for social media…The truth is that you’ve got plenty of content right at your fingertips! With phone cameras now being so good, there’s no longer any excuse for not posting photos of your latest project or funny office moment. Coming up with ideas when nothing is happening is the real issue here. Even then, why not educate your audience on an aspect of your business? Or post a link to a new article that’s relevant to your business? Content is not as limited as you think and having a chat with your colleagues, looking at your competitors or looking for some ideas online can really help you come up with some great content ideas!
5. Trying to Do it all yourself (The DIY issue)
Like I mentioned, small businesses usually have less time, smaller budgets, and smaller teams. All this adds up to a lot of business owners doing all their marketing by themselves. While you can save money in the short term by doing it all yourself, you must ask yourself a few questions; Can I keep doing it all without burning out? Am I losing out on leads that people experienced in this field could bring to the table? If I do burn out, will I lose more money than I’ve saved? These are all realistic questions to ask and, scarily enough, reveal the truth about doing everything yourself. Burnout is real and very dangerous for a small business owner who can’t make money when they’re not working.
If you find yourself in a similar position, want to avoid potential burn out or just need a team to do it all for you, why not give our Yourmarketingdept.online services a chance? Designed for busy business owners, our team can take care of Social Media management, email marketing and even paid ads for you! On a budget? We have packages to suit all budgets and needs.
Find out more about our Yourmarketingdept.online packages here
Join our Autus tribe of Businesses looking to grow!
Sign up and keep up to date with sales and marketing strategies, industry insights, How Tos, CRM, and Marketing & Sales Automation tools and much more.
About Autus
Autus provide Revenue Growth Platforms, Marketing & Sales Automation and Digital Marketing services to help sales and marketing personnel and teams build efficient and effective sales and marketing best practices and automate their marketing and sales processes by leveraging personalised content, various digital marketing tactics, segmentation and behaviour of their prospects and customers.
Autus recommend various products for automation, such as Active Campaign, Hubspot, Mailchimp and SharpSpring…it will vary on your requirements and budget the best option for your business.
Find out more here.
Our founder, Tom Berry, also provides selective fractional CMO services and is a member of some client boards.
Let’s keep in touch!
If our team at Autus can help advise further, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our founder, Tom Berry.
