Throughout my time in the industry, I’ve heard more than one company say, “We can’t afford marketing right now, we need sales. Spending money on marketing would be ‘nice to have.’”
One of my first jobs in the industry was as an outside sales representative for a large lawn and tree care company serving high-end residential and commercial clients. The company hired me to build a new territory with no name recognition and the office and shop were 45 minutes away.
This was the mid-’90s, so there was no social media or quick way to gain awareness in the territory. I needed to develop a marketing strategy to generate awareness and leads. To add to my challenge, the company was very frugal with its marketing dollars. This forced me to develop guerilla marketing tactics and learn how to market efficiently on a shoestring budget to generate results.
Where to begin
The marketing strategy started with understanding what our company did better than everyone else. The foundation of the marketing strategy began with a simple SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. Just as a building can’t be supported by a weak foundation, your business needs a strong foundation to achieve your next level of growth.
Consider these points to keep your SWOT analysis on track:
1. Write strengths and weaknesses from the customer’s perspective.
Consider your strengths and weaknesses objectively as your customers see them. For my new territory, I surveyed the customer service team, technicians and current customers in the adjacent territory to get a perspective on what we did best and what needed improvement.
2. Opportunities and threats are outside of your business.
Quite often, business owners confuse threats with weaknesses. Opportunities and threats would exist even if your business did not. Product costs would still rise and fall even if you did not own a business, the same with regulatory pressure, weather fluctuations and more.
3. Keep the SWOT simple and concise.
Your SWOT should be a concise list of bullet points. Less is more. Choose the top three items in your SWOT to focus on and plan around. This will help build an elevator pitch for your business and provide context for the marketing messaging you can use to draw prospects in and generate leads.
After doing a solid SWOT analysis, I built the rest of the marketing strategy and executed it. The result: taking a remote territory into one with great route density that had profitable sales and was coveted by technicians because they efficiently serviced properties and made a great wage.
Two years later, I trained new sales reps with brand new territories and provided direction on developing a marketing strategy, executing a marketing plan and closing sales.
Ways to optimize your marketing
As a small business owner, it is common to outsource marketing tasks and work with business consultants, which can provide valuable insight into your business.
However, if you seek high-level marketing leadership, there’s another option known as a fractional vice president of marketing. This is not an individual to write blog posts, design your logo or build social media content.
A fractional marketing vice president is an experienced marketing executive providing part-time vice president or director-level marketing leadership.
Most small businesses do not have the resources or enough work to justify a full-time marketing vice president. The great part is you gain the experience and leadership of a high-level marketer at a fraction of the cost, which makes a marketing executive affordable.
In addition to crafting strategy, these individuals can select and train an in-house marketing team, analyze marketing data to improve lead flow and sales conversion and develop a structure for your marketing and sales campaign.
Whether you’re building your first territory or the next satellite location, remember that marketing is more than a “nice to have.”
