B2B Marketing, Podcast

AI05 Small business marketing: 5 Key challenges to making marketing work whilst maintaining profitability

Are you wanting to grow your small business marketing online but are struggling to crack the code of how to effectively do marketing whilst staying profitable?

Imagine this…

The main weakness in your business is traffic and leads. You have referrals and word of mouth coming in from networking online, but you’d like to get more leads so that you could offer a more leveraged service (perhaps an online course, an evergreen webinar, or group coaching?).

You enjoy the challenge of generating traffic and believe it’s a good skill to develop (and you totally love learning new skills, right?).

There’s just one major problem…

Your website is getting crickets, less than 10 views per day… and this isn’t giving you the sales you need to have a sustainable business.

So what have you done to get more traffic?

If you’re really honest… not much.

Perhaps you’ve shared some blog posts via Buffer or some other cool scheduling tool, which goes to your FB page (which doesn’t have much of an audience there) and your personal profile.

Submitted guest blog posts or actively pitching to get onto podcasts as a guests? Nope.

Facebook ads? Put some money into it, but didn’t really know what you were doing and lost the money as you didn’t even get a single conversion (i.e. nobody took up your lead magnet offer or bought anything from you).

Cold emails? Tried it but just not your thing.

SEO? Nope.

Hosting your own podcast? Yes, but you’re getting only getting less than 50 downloads per episode so nothing to call home about (and you don’t actually know if anyone is going from your podcast to your website anyway…)

Cold calling? Err.. no way Jose!

shiny object syndrome — Shiny object syndrome, anyone?

Now here’s what you’re really struggling with:

1. You worry about wasting time. What you do requires developing trust with people so that they can be confident in working with you. Should you even bother with online marketing, or should you work on word of mouth referrals?

2. You feel like you have an ever-growing list of tactics to increase traffic and leads, but not sure how to choose the best one to start with (especially considering your concern about wasting time and previous failed attempts).

So what do you do?

Firstly, take a deep breath.

You’re definitely not alone with these challenges.

Having worked with and trained hundreds of small businesses over the past 7 years, from individual freelancers to teams of 12 generating $3M+ in revenue, we’ve observed some common struggles when it comes to marketing a business.

So let’s get into the challenges.

[bctt tweet=”Want to know the 5 Key challenges to making marketing work whilst maintaining profitability in your small business? Read this. ” username=”anferneec”]

5 Key challenges to making marketing work whilst maintaining profitability in your small business.

Prefer to listen rather than read?

READ How to do audience research & cold outreach ft. Amanda Natividad from Sparktoro

Click play here:

Challenge #1: Prioritisation

Are you clear on what activities to do, and in which order, to maximise ROI?

To put it another way, do you know WHAT to do, and WHEN (in which order), to get the biggest bang for your buck?

Challenge #2: Lacking marketing expertise in-house

Have you got someone experienced to lead your marketing – to plan, execute and report on marketing campaigns so you can focus on your key strengths?

Can you afford NOT to hire someone, full-time or part-time, to help drive your marketing forward?

Challenge #3: Misalignment between marketing and sales

Are you missing revenue targets & growth opportunities because sales & marketing aren’t on the same page?

Challenge #4: Lack of systems and processes.

Are you able to produce consistent marketing, build brand awareness, capture & nurture leads? Are you providing a memorable experience for users throughout the multiple touch points of the customer journey?

Challenge #5: Insufficient data.

Can you truly understand what’s working and what’s not? Do you have the ability to make smarter data-driven business decisions in terms of allocation of resources and budget?

…

We’ll be sharing weekly tips and insights on how to overcome these challenges on our Authentic Influence podcast. Make sure you subscribe to receive each new episode in your favourite audio app.

Got a specific challenge or question you want help with? Let me know in the comments below and I’ll tackle it in an upcoming episode.

Free Linkedin Viral Case Study

Learn how we got over 71,000+ views on Linkedin with just 3 posts in 1 month

READ Repurposing video content: How to turn 1 video into 18 pieces of content for social media

Blow up your Linkedin and receive our weekly growth marketing tips & insights in your inbox.

AI05 Small business marketing: 5 Key challenges to making marketing work whilst maintaining profitability

Are you wanting to grow your small business marketing online but are struggling to crack the code of how to effectively do marketing whilst staying profitable?