If you're attacking your market from multiple positions, and your competition isn't, you have all the advantage and it will show up in your increased success and income." - Jay Abraham: Marketing Expert
What's the most cost-effective way to increase your market share, grow your customer base, and increase your sales? It’s not rocket science, but it just might level the playing field with your larger competition and save you money in the process. The solution is to outsource your marketing.
Unfortunately, in hard times, companies often cut back in their marketing department. These companies tend to separate the function of sales, from marketing. As such, they'll make cuts in their marketing personnel, while asking their sales force to continue producing the same results or better. While it’s important to save money in a bad economy, reducing your marketing is not the way to go. Instead, make the decision to outsource your marketing and keep those sales leads coming.
Even if your business is a small one, outsourcing your marketing provides several benefits your business needs to succeed. I’ve always advocated outsourcing marketing – it’s less expensive, produces solid sales leads, and provides one single message to market.
Marketing is Your Entire Company In one Message to Market
Companies often misunderstand the essential functions of their marketing department. They fail to see that marketing is their entire business. It’s their engineering, design, manufacturing, sales and customer service, all rolled into one cohesive message to customers. If you’ve ever wanted to get a message out to your customers about your company's greatest abilities – be it turn-time on parts or design and manufacturing capabilities, then your marketing message is the way to go. Here are four areas where outsourcing your marketing can help your business not only grow, but compete with your larger competition.
1. Lowers Customer Acquisition Costs
Do you know what it costs your company to secure a new customer? If the profit margins on your products or services are healthy, but the cost to secure a new customer is beyond this cost, then you’ll simply lose money. It’s amazing how many entrepreneurs or businesses have fantastic ideas, products, and services, but simply no idea how much it costs, or how to secure, new customers.
Customer acquisition is the single most important aspect of your business. If you can’t find the customers, and it costs too much to get them, then you’ll lose. It’s that simple. A marketing firm can help reduce the cost of securing a new customer, and show you ways to keep those customers coming back for more.
One way to increase your customer retention is by using a back-end rebate and reward program. To learn more about how this will help you retain more customers, please go to: Sample Back-End Rebate Excel Sheet for Customer Retention
2. Levels Playing Field With Larger Competitors
Perception is truly 100% reality. You may be up against bigger competition with deeper pockets, but if your marketing is just as good, you’ll be able to compete for the same customers. It is done all the time, in all kinds of industries. Small businesses can compete with their larger competition and in a number of cases, be perceived as experts in their field. In fact, by outsourcing your marketing, you are able to be much more cost effective than your larger competition – especially those with large marketing departments that simply add to their overhead.
3. Inexpensive Way to Reach Audience
Perhaps the single biggest benefit to outsourcing your marketing is that it is a cost effective substitute for a full time marketing department. Even if you’ve decided to keep your marketing department, getting another point of view, another opinion, and another perspective, helps tremendously. Do you know how well your current marketing plans work? Do they provide the kind of returns your company is looking for? Do you know how to measure the success of your marketing plans?
The fact is, you can choose when, and how often, to outsource your marketing plans with an outsourced firm, and you can measure the effectiveness of each plan as it is implemented. Outsourcing your marketing is extremely cost effective. You decide when and how often to use the marketing firm, and you can measure the effectiveness of each subsequent marketing plan.
The above video outlines five inexpensive marketing strategies. To learn more about these strategies, please go here.
4. Provides Leads and Essential Market Data
What is your competition doing in this economy? Have they cut back on essential services that would allow your company to capitalize? What is their message to market? Is your sales department pursuing the right business? In difficult times, several companies make the mistake of eliminating their marketing initiatives all-together. In fact, it’s a mistake that the best companies capitalize on. Your company needs to know everything about the market you service. That includes your customers and your competition. Knowing what your competition is doing in these difficult times, how they operate, what they do well, and what they don’t, will allow your company to capitalize.
I’ve outlined four basic benefits of outsourcing your marketing. These are the benefits I’ve seen first hand for small to medium sized businesses. While it’s true that in hard times, you need to save money, there is an argument to be made that these times are perhaps the best time to increase your marketing efforts. After all, you need more sales, and marketing is the essential tool to making that happen.
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