5 Ways to Efficiently Market Your Business

Marketing your business takes a lot of work — especially if you’re a small or growing organization. When you don’t have the resources to hire a whole marketing department, you can wind up doing a lot of it yourself. There’s generating content, managing social media, email marketing, web optimization, branding, and more. Plus, you need to stay on top of testing and analytics if you want to make sure your hard work is actually paying off.

Solo and smaller businesses often just don’t have the kind of time or manpower it takes to really craft a solid marketing campaign. Larger organizations, meanwhile, might struggle with siloed departments, slow decision-making, outdated software, and consistent branding. Either way, it may take some big changes to build a leaner, more efficient marketing strategy. Here are some of the best ways to speed up, streamline, and optimize your marketing.

1. Get Outside Help

One of the most difficult parts of marketing a modern business is coming up with exactly the right strategy. Do you invest in paid ads, focus on content creation, or lean into social media? How exactly can you use each of those channels to reach and win over your target audience? Many brands hire teams of in-house content strategists, marketers, and social media specialists to handle these problems. It can, however, be faster and more affordable to look for outside help.

Contracting with a growth marketing agency can take the hassle and guesswork out of figuring out the best way for your brand to move forward. The right partner can handle everything from your content strategy and SEO to getting your brand talked about in big publications. By doing so, it can free you up to focus more on what you do best — your products and services. Working with an agency also gives you more flexibility to scale up your marketing efforts as you grow.

2. Create a Referral Program

Why sell yourself when you could get other people to sell for you, without even hiring them as employees? A solid referral program can help your brand expand its reach with much less cost and effort than other strategies. To get started, you’ll need to first create a scalable system with clear rewards for your partners, customers, and affiliates. Most brands opt for a tiered system, where the benefits (discounts, cash rewards, etc) increase exponentially with each referral.

One aspect of a strong referral program that many brands overlook is ease of use. Folks are more likely to make referrals if accessing their rewards is as simple as clicking a few buttons. A good strategy is to implement a simple, user-friendly interface where they can input their referral info online. Look for an affordable SaaS solution to power your referral program — choose one tailored to e-commerce, fintech, real estate, or whichever industry you’re in.

3. Partner With Influencers

Partnering with influencers is another way to amp up your marketing without expending as much internal effort. The right partners can boost your brand visibility overnight and help you connect with exactly the right audience. A good influencer will speak positively and authentically about your brand, ideally based on their personal experience. They’ll focus on sharing their honest (positive) feedback with their followers and help you grow genuine connections with prospects.

With influencer partnerships, there’s also a chance of your brand going viral literally overnight. That means a chance of suddenly scoring tens of thousands of new followers and prospects with practically no effort. However, with that chance comes the possibility of an embarrassing public faux pas or major values mismatch. For this reason, it’s tremendously important to find and work only with influencers you trust and who resonate with your mission and your audience.

4. Go Local

Local SEO can be one of the most cost-effective ways for brick-and-mortar businesses to market themselves without spending a dime. That’s because so many people start their search for a service, provider, or store type with a simple Google Maps location prompt. To take advantage of local SEO, start by claiming, naming, and updating your Google Business profile. Make sure your business address, phone number, and website are current and consistent with other listings.

You can also optimize your website for local SEO by creating posts and pages for local keywords. You should also use local schema markup and list your business address (or addresses) on your site. Finally, make sure your site is optimized for mobile, as location-based searches tend to happen on peoples’ phones. Search engines like Google also prioritize sites that are optimized for mobile use — and that load quickly — in their SERP rankings.

5. Run Better Email Campaigns

Automating your email campaigns has long been a quick, easy way to put your marketing efforts on autopilot. However, simple changes, like adding deeper levels of personalization, can make them even more effective. Even older legacy email clients, like MailChimp and Constant Contact, allow marketers to segment their email lists for specific audiences. In this way, you can target specific prospects, seamlessly offering more personalized, relevant experiences.

More advanced email clients use technologies like AI to make emails even easier and drive better results. For example, some programs can calculate how often a particular recipient should receive emails to avoid them getting annoyed and unsubscribing. Other programs use natural language processing algorithms to help you write better subjects and content. Others can tailor unique subject lines to individual users and create dynamic content that updates in real time.

Market Smarter, Not Harder

Marketing more efficiently is all about automating and outsourcing whatever you can to companies, individuals, and advanced technologies. The fewer tedious tasks your team has to take on, the more time they can devote to strategizing for long-term growth. Put your focus outward, on partners and platforms that can systemize your marketing efforts for you. There’s no reason to spend big on marketing mistakes when experts and algorithms can do it better for you.