One Man Marketing Department !!!

As an entrepreneur, small business, or a one-man show, marketing can be very difficult to tackle. Where do you start? What would a realistic marketing plan be? How can you get the most out of your time? These are all questions that small businesses face. Here's how to "hit it out of the park" as a one-person marketing department...

Set Realistic Goals:

We'll just throw this out there - you're not going to have the capabilities of Coca Cola when it comes to your marketing efforts. It's great to set high standards, just make sure that they're obtainable. When you're a one person show, what you can and cannot accomplish is really black and white - how many hours in the week do you have available to set aside for marketing and what skills do you possess to execute against your marketing goals. Especially as you grow, the problem becomes that you don't have the time or expertise to hit your goals and that's when it's time to reach out for help.


Discover Your Buyer Personas:

Not only will your buyer personas help you communicate effectively with your targeted buyer, it makes marketing easier and much more efficient. When you have a buyer persona put together, the time and effort that you put in to creating great marketing content drops because you're familiar with that buyer, you know how to talk to them, and what forms of communication you'll use to grab their attention.

Focus, Focus, Focus:

Don't spend your time working on marketing initiatives that don't pay off - work on those that do or have the potential to. Social media is one of the biggest pit-falls of one man marketing departments because it can be time consuming and people have the belief that they need to be actively engaged on EVERY social media platform out there. Yeah, in a perfect world you'd have a strong presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and whatever other channel you've identified, but the reality is that you may just not have the time. If LinkedIn is pulling in a great amount of traffic and new leads, but Twitter isn't, that's fine. Take some focus off of Twitter and shift it over to LinkedIn to capitalize more on what's happening there. Take a look at what your winners are and focus your attention there.

And speaking of social media, don't forget online social media marketing sites like 40Billion to help make your life easier. They specialize in promotion of small businesses by broadcasting and promoting to a large network of several million users across the most popular social networking sites for small businesses - including Twitter, LinkedIn, 40Billion, and even Facebook. Innovative services such as promoted posts and promoted company listings were created for entrepreneurs to tap into a growing, active network online without spending thousands on pay-per-click ads or traditional advertising.

Create the Ever-Green Effect:

Creating new material is really time consuming - writing, designing, editing, publishing, etc. Instead of having to create everything from scratch, build a foundation of collateral that you can pull from that's "evergreen." Create things that stay relevant for a long period of time, or that you can recycle the next year, that you can utilize over and over again. Then, you can supplement those pieces with new, fresh, topical pieces that will help fill out the conversation or campaign.

Don't Forget Calls to Action:

Always remember that your focus is on filling a pipeline and moving people through a sales funnel. And one big key to doing that is by having clear calls to action throughout your marketing efforts. People want to know what to do next - tell them what that is. If they're on your blog, what's the next step? If they're reading an email, what's the next step? If they met you at a trade show, what's the next step? You get the idea.

Automation is Your Friend:

The more that you can push off on technology, the better, and here's why - it makes your life easier. Instead of having to squeeze in time to get an email out to a new lead, your systems do it for you. Instead of manually nurturing a group of leads, let your systems do it for you. You're saving time and your marketing is automatically working leads through the sales funnel for you. Pretty awesome, huh? Now, get started!

About 40Billion.com

40Billion is the social network of entrepreneurs and crowdfunders - a social platform for connecting business owners and promoting the things they create. Use 40Billion to find professional contacts and projects, get affordable digital marketing and social media promotion, and show off your creations to the world. Awarded Best Small Business Marketing Platform by US Business News!

Recommended: Why The Business Plan Is Still Useful For Startup Success