Small business traditional and digital marketing trends (2016)
Small businesses are on the rise and their respective marketing budgets are projected to be, as well. In need of marketing ideas for your small business? Three trends Allison Checcchi, CMO of YP outlined in this article include:
SMB presence with social media. As she outlined in the article, many small businesses will post one-way messages to their followers about their products instead of engaging in a 2-way conversation. At Dalziel & Company, we frequently encounter clients taking this same approach. We often see that small businesses lack a social media strategy around how to utilize these channels to get higher returns.
CRM, which means Customer Relationship Management. Having a formal plan in place promotes loyalty and repeat customers. At Dalziel & Company, we really look to ensure that our clients have the infrastructure ready to support any marketing efforts. There are many CRM tools you can purchase for low monthly subscription rates that will help facilitate this. We recently implemented Insightly for a client, which is a hybrid of CRM and project management. By doing this, it freed up a significant amount of time for key company stakeholders to re-focus energies on other tasks. How much time are you spending doing basic follow up and managing client relationships? How much do you automate? What amount is digital vs. traditional methods of communication?
“High touch is in, self-service is out.” While you want to have self-service options available to customers when you’re not available one of the most unique aspects of SMBs is the ability to provide high touch service to its customers (i.e. close relationship with customers; human interaction, walking customer or client through the process). As much as we try to automate, this is an aspect that should never be ignored.
