Marketing can be a serious drain on an entrepreneur's time. When you're building your company, you'll likely find your marketing efforts becoming a drain on your time. Your marketing plan may have several core elements that will be best handled by an agency, saving you time for training and trial-and-error efforts. And that outfit won't be hard: There are plenty of modern marketing agencies which specialize in managing email outreach, social media outreach and the researching of leads. A company I know, called Task Drive, for example, covers email outreach, lead research and “social selling.” It is worth checking a site like Agency Spotter to find a reputable agency for your own specialization. Subscription forms are what a visitor fills in to give consent to a company sending a newsletter or regular updates. Building up your email list is also rucial (see some tips here), as email marketing can be a powerful part of almost any business’s marketing strategy. If you are looking for a good overview of your website(s), content or competitor content, this tool will save you time. The thing is, however, that social media works best when it’s organic. There are many ways to shave down the time you spend on marketing, and many tools and people that can help.
Marketing can be a serious drain on an entrepreneur’s time. But there are ways to progress without the heavy workload.
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When you’re building your company, you’ll likely find your marketing efforts becoming a drain on your time. Still, those efforts are crucial, because marketing drives growth.
Yet, the downside: The effort you put in to achieve a balance between your time spent on product development versus your time spent on a go-to-market strategy is going to dominate your schedule — or that of any budding entrepreneur.
If you feel yourself being dragged into marketing mayhem too often, know that there are ways to drive marketing traction with minimal oversight. Here are five:
1. Build from the top down.
All entrepreneurs have read a few books on popular market strategies as they’ve mulled the possibility of starting a business. Then, once they’ve made the initial investment, and found a place to work, they will begin putting together core pieces of their marketing strategy. Often, they’ll do the legwork themselves, and hire junior marketers merely to help fill in the gaps.
A founder’s knowledge of his or her marketing strategy, however, can lead to a level of oversight from which it’s hard to backpedal. That’s why a solid layer of marketing management should be established between the founder and the team; otherwise, the founder’s time will be burdened.
If you’re that founder, investing in an experienced senior marketer to build out your team, someone who can come on board early, will put you in the position to dip in and out as you see fit.
2. Use a modern, multi-discipline agency.
Before putting in the significant amount of time and effort it takes to build out a marketing department, consider whether your needs can be met via outsourcing. Your marketing plan may have several core elements that will be best handled by an agency, saving you time for training and trial-and-error efforts. And that outfit won’t be hard: There are plenty of modern marketing agencies which specialize in managing email outreach, social media outreach and the researching of leads.
Many of these tasks can also overlap with those your sales department handles, such as lead qualification and on-site customer engagement. A company I know, called Task Drive, for example, covers email…
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