Starved for time? 9 marketing shortcuts for small businesses

small business marketing tips
by: Megan Andersen , October 9, 2018

As a small-business owner, you’re constantly pulled in different directions, with myriad responsibilities and decisions to be made on a daily basis.

As a result, you may feel like marketing is the least of your worries, that you lack the time to create and implement a full-fledged campaign for driving in more sales. Of course, the truth is that effective marketing is key to driving awareness of your business and growing your revenues.

“With an effective marketing plan in place, you’ll be able to flesh out such things as potential new growth opportunities, who your actual customers are versus who you thought they were, how to acquire more customers and where best to spend future marketing dollars,” advises Steve Olenski in Forbes. “Companies that fail to create a marketing strategy are destined to either fail or struggle indefinitely.”

The good news is that there are shortcuts to putting together a solid marketing plan. To that end, here are a few suggestions that may help.

  • Keep a marketing calendar, then plan ahead so you don’t need to make knee-jerk decisions just to put some kind of marketing in place.


  • Whenever possible, use templates for your marketing activities so you’re not reinventing the wheel each time you renew your efforts. Templates come in particularly handy when crafting email copy and social media posts.


  • Don’t fix it if it’s not broken. Once you know you’re getting an excellent ROI through a certain marketing venue or ad, keep investing in it.


  • Look for handy tools on the market that can automate functions you need for inbound campaigns, email marketing, social media marketing, online review management and SEO. Many are well worth the time and energy you will save. Use the data you gather from those same tools to make your further decisions about marketing easier.


  • When possible, delegate functions of your campaign that are easy to understand but require some legwork. Could an entry-level employee or intern within your company use some experience in creating posts for and responding to social media, for example?


  • When in doubt as to strategy, observe what your competitors are doing and try to do it better. They must be achieving a good ROI if they’re using a certain campaign or venue; start there, and use what you know about your customer base to fine-tune your own campaign.


  • When crafting copy for content marketing, understand that human attention spans are short and blogs need not be long to be effective.


  • Repurpose content whenever possible, making blogs into social media posts, e-books into videos, whitepapers into infographics, etc.
  • If you get overwhelmed, consider consulting a professional. Accessing such expertise could be a huge time- and money-saver.


    • Custom Toll Free can set up your small business with an easy-to-implement inbound marketing campaign that automatically drives in qualified leads. Call us for more information at 1-800-Customize.

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