But the vast majority of marketers and companies, especially in B2B, continue to struggle with content marketing.

What’s the problem?

There isn’t one clear answer that explains why most companies do a poor job with content marketing.

Some companies do a poor job executing cross-channel marketing strategies.

In a survey by Econsultancy and Adobe, only 14% of marketers reported that their organizations executed integrated campaigns across various marketing channels.

Other companies rely too much on a disparate mix of technologies that often don’t talk to each other.

Most marketers and companies fail with content marketing because they focus on “content” and ignore “marketing.”

Think about it for a moment. Why are you or your company creating and sharing content? As I wrote previously:

Content marketing refers to creating information (content) that has value to others. The creator of the content ultimately wants to sell a product or service to prospective buyers who benefit from the content, but the goal of content marketing is rarely to sell directly. Instead, the goal of content marketing is to encourage people to read and perhaps engage with the content, and to begin developing a relationship with the person or entity that created that content.

Most content marketers measure “engagement” as a re-tweet or a like.

But successful content marketing must go beyond simple vanity metrics. For content marketing to succeed, it must help a company develop a relationship with a prospective customer. And for that to happen, content must create an emotional reaction in the prospective customer that more closely connects the prospective customer to your brand.

Many content marketers simply don’t understand this. Great content marketing is not about curating other people’s stuff.

If you want to develop a relationship with people who read and engage with your content, then the “marketing” part of “content marketing” deserves as much of your focus as “content”.

Fortunately, great marketing has one common element that transcends languages and cultures. Marketing is storytelling. Great marketing is about phenomenal stories.

Stories help shape beliefs and also help people remember the things you want them to remember. Authentic and compelling stories help build a brand.

Why are stories so critical to effective marketing?

Stories are powerful because they can create a mythology around a brand. For example, owners of the iPhone believe that each successive iPhone is much better than the model it replaces, which is not always true. Here’s a short video from the Jimmy Kimmel show pranking people with what people believe is Apple’s new iPhone 7 (it’s actually the person’s own iPhone). Watch how people react.

Stories should be honest and consistent. They should also create characters your audience will like. For example, “Giving” is a 3 minute commercial for Thailand mobile phone service provider True Move. The story begins with a young boy caught stealing medicine for his sick mother. A nearby small restaurant owner helps the boy by buying the medicine and also gives the boy soup to take home to his mom. Watch the video to see the story unfold – it’s a powerful and emotional message conveyed in very simple, short video.

Compelling stories can work on their own – without props, dialogue or subtitles. Watch this phenomenal video encouraging people to always wear their seatbelt. How did you feel when the video ended?

Here’s another example: a wonderful video from Chipotle, a popular fast food restaurant known for their organically-farmed meat and produce. How do you feel about the story in this video?

One more important note about stories. Stories can have sub-plots.

For example, did you know that only 39% of B2B marketers recycle content into other formats? If you’ve told a compelling story in one marketing channel, you have opportunities to focus on sub-plots in other channels and integrate the marketing.

The post How To Create Content Marketing Unicorns appeared first on crowdspring Small Business Resource Center.

The most successful marketers and teams set clear, crisp goals, develop smart strategies, and experiment with different tactics.

But even then, many campaigns fail to return the money marketers invest on marketing efforts.

I’ve previously written about lean marketing – testing your ideas in small batches, listening to feedback, tweaking campaigns, and re-testing.

There’s another important concept that complements lean marketing: marketing velocity.

Marketing velocity is the speed at which marketing efforts deliver measurable results.

You can accelerate marketing velocity with various enabling technologies like marketing automation, CRM and other tools and techniques.

But at the end of the day, the true measure of marketing velocity is the speed with which you develop your goals, set strategy and most importantly, deploy tactics.

Keep in mind that marketing velocity and agility are two distinctly different concepts. Velocity is about doing things faster. Agility is about testing in small-batches, listening/measuring outcomes, tweaking and re-testing.

Why should you care about marketing velocity?

The answer is deceptively simple: speed matters.

Until you actually deploy your marketing tactics, you learn nothing. You can spend months strategizing, developing theories, creating collateral, etc.

But real testing doesn’t begin until you actually market.

If your competitors are able to set their goals, develop strategies and deploy marketing campaigns at a faster velocity than you can muster, you will never be able to beat them in the market unless your strategies and tactics are materially better.

Even if your strategies and tactics are better, you’ll still need to deploy them at a reasonable pace. After all, there are many good tools that allow marketers to track, measure and turn-around real-time insights about their marketing efforts.

The best marketers can make adjustments and tweak their strategies in near real-time. If your competitors are doing so and you’re not, you’re already falling behind.

Ultimately, you need marketing that moves at the speed of ideas.

Here are three tips to help you improve your team’s marketing velocity:

1. Create a solid foundation for success.

It’s tempting to simply pick up the pace of your marketing tactics and assume that your marketing velocity will naturally increase.

Before you do so, you need to develop a clear set of goals. After all, doing something faster, without a clear goal, is pointless.

Goals shouldn’t be easily achievable – but they should be realistic. This is where many marketing teams fail.

It’s counter-productive to have many goals tied to a specific strategy.

You can have many different strategies and different goals associated with each strategy.

But you should not have more than a few well-defined goals for each strategy.

Your goals should be directly connected to your key business objectives. If there’s no direct connection, you’re merely creating and increasing noise. If you choose more than 1 or 2 core goals, you’ll mostly distract yourself and your team.

For example, few businesses will benefit from increasing their audience on Facebook or getting more shares or “likes” there. Likes, impressions, page views – these are mostly vanity metrics that don’t produce tangible business outcomes. Such metrics might be relevant to growing an already established brand (although even for established brands, those are mostly vanity metrics), but they are rarely helpful to startups and small businesses.

Kissmetrics has a terrific post exploring how different marketing teams set goals.

Once you’ve defined a clear set of goals, develop strategies intended to meet each goal.

2. Test in small batches.

Instead of spending weeks or even months to plan and research, develop your untested assumptions and quickly test those assumptions.

For example, do not commit to a three-month email drip-marketing campaign that takes you one month to implement. Instead, set-up one to two-week mini-tests that you can deploy within 1 or 2 days.

If your experiments fail, don’t worry — this is normal.

It’s better to fail with campaigns that take 1 or 2 days to create than with campaigns that took you months to develop. This is where marketing velocity can truly help you.

3. Be prepared to change gears quickly.

If you’re smart about testing in small batches, failures can lead to incremental success.

For example, if you run a short email marketing campaign that you deploy within a few days, you can assess open rates, click rates, and A/B test subject lines, images, etc.

When you run your second email marketing campaign the following week, you’ve already gathered valuable insights that help you to tweak and to improve the follow-up campaign.

If you keep iterating in this fashion, each successive campaign will build on what you learn from the prior campaigns, This way, you improve the odds that you will meet your marketing goal(s).

Compare this with a team that spends a month building a deep drip-marketing campaign. During that month, they’ll learn nothing actionable. In fact, they won’t start learning until they deploy their campaign.

Ultimately, keep in mind that when you invest a majority of your marketing time, efforts and budget into developing strategies and tactics (rather than executing them), you make a gamble that your strategies and tactics will actually succeed.

This is a sucker’s bet because most marketing strategies fail.

Increase your marketing velocity and you’ll put yourself and your company in a much better position to succeed.

Execution is everything.

The post How Marketing Velocity Can Help You Increase Sales and Revenue appeared first on crowdspring Small Business Resource Center.

Though speculation has bubbled over the past four years that such tactics were losing efficacy in a world where younger internet users, in particular, were showing a preference for fast-paced messaging services, data shows that email use has actually risen substantially during that time period.

It is predicted that more than 1/3 of the global population will be using email by 2019.

That doesn’t mean that email strategies are easy to develop and execute.

Spam filters are the perpetual bane of the email marketer’s existence, and the dawn of Google’s Promotions tab has made things even more difficult.

In such a world, knowledge is power, which is why we were so excited to take a look at IBM Marketing Cloud’s 2016 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study. The comprehensive study takes a look at email marketing KPIs by metric, industry, delivery period, function, and region, offering a useful perspective on email marketing and communication strategies.

Here are some of the key takeaways.

• Transactional emails — or emails that are prompted by specific user actions and inaction — receive far greater traction than non-transactional emails, with higher open and click-through rates. This underscores the importance of developing effective system-generated communications to guide your customers and potential customers through the experiences of engaging with your brand.
• Though marketers often talk about the opportunities associated with event-driven email campaigns — especially around the holidays — these emails suffer from low open and click-through rates. This can be partially attributed to the fact that overall email volume experiences an uptick during such time periods, making it easy for your emails to get lost in the mix.
• There is a distinctive benefit in establishing a frequency balance. Marketers who send more frequent email communications receive lower open and click-through rates per campaign, but they receive more aggregate traffic and conversions as a result of the strategy. It’s the law of numbers: more opportunities to generate results tends to add up.
• Surprising no one, mobile email use continues to climb at a steady rate. Though some industries see higher desktop and webmail activity, mobile is dominating overall, particularly in spaces where communications target consumers directly. Though the trend is not new, these findings emphasize how important it is to make sure your emails are designed to be just as appealing on a person’s phone or tablet as it would be on a computer monitor.

The report contains many more juicy details and can be viewed here.

The post What Trends in Email Marketing Mean For Your Strategy appeared first on crowdspring Small Business Resource Center.

After posting the content, your blog post got retweeted by an influencer and traffic to your site has doubled.

Congratulations!

It’s time to do it again.

Effective content marketing can be a grind, especially for small teams or individuals with other marketing priorities to manage on a regular basis.

According to a LinkedIn report, the number one challenge businesses face with content marketing is having the time and bandwidth to create content. The second challenge? Creating enough content variety and volume.

With limited time and an unlimited need for content, it is important to get the most out of your existing efforts before heading back to the drawing board. Instead of starting from scratch on your next piece of content, consider giving some of your best-performing blog posts new life by repurposing it for visual content marketing.

Why visual content marketing?

Visual content marketing can breathe new life into existing content. You know your content is relevant; your blog post’s past performance has already proven that. You are just repackaging it in a format that will reach more potential customers.

Image Courtesy of The Media Octopus

What are the best visual formats for repurposing content?

Infographics

Image Courtesy of Visual.ly

Infographics are a popular form of content marketing because they take the substance of a good blog post or case study and compress the content into something significantly more shareable.

Many companies have repurposed their best blog posts into infographics with great success.

Buffer turned its How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy From Scratch post into an infographic during their “no new content” month (more on that here) and continues to use portions the infographic for their email courses.

Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko, even transforms other blogs’ best posts into infographics (he calls them “guestographics”), a method he says is his favorite for generating backlinks to his site.

With the content already outlined in the blog post, the bulk of the work is in the hands of the designer who can immediately get to work on communicating the information visually.

Social Media Images

Image Courtesy of @RobinGood

To drive new traffic to a blog post your audience needs to actually share your content. The best way to do that? Use social media images.

After reviewing the engagement habits of their entire user base, Buffer reported that tweets with images received 150% more retweets than tweets without images so a significant bump in reach could be just one good image away.

Simply reposting the featured image from your blog post with a link to your content can get old for your audience, fast.

To avoid this, you can create a series of distinct social-only images from one blog post if you know what to look for.

These unique images will allow you to re-share your content multiple times without fear of repetition for your audience while testing out what kind of imagery your audience is most receptive to.

Some effective forms of original social media images are quotes, how-to’s, and screen grabs. Each of these can benefit your audience in different ways and depend on the content of your blog:

Quotes: Twitter reports that tweets with quotes get a 19% boost in retweets, so why not sneak a quote from your post into an image?

Visual step-by-steps: If your post is a guide, consider illustrating the steps in a step-by-step image. This gives the audience an overview of what to expect in the post while encouraging them to dive deeper by clicking the link.

Screengrabs: A screengrab of the blog post itself allows you to display content from the post in a different format and offers a “sneak peek” into the best part of a post.

Most social media images can be created with online image editors and a little design know-how, but don’t be afraid to look for design help for your first few rounds. Consider setting up a free, no obligation design consultation with a crowdspring design expert to see if the social media images are something you should take to the crowd.

Updated Images on Blog Posts

Image Courtesy of WordPress

Once infographics and social media images start boosting traffic to your post, it’s important that your content is optimized for sharing to get more returns from new visitors.

One of the best ways to help boost shares on your post is with the right amount of images. According to BuzzSumo, the right amount of images is one every 75-100 words:

In a study of over one million articles, BuzzSumo looked at how many blog posts with images were shared. Then they looked at how many images, per how many words, got the best results. What they found was articles with an image once every 75-100 words got double the amount of shares of articles with fewer images.

With that in mind, it’s important to revisit your blog post and make sure you have the right amount of images. If not, you may want to consider creating an entirely new set of images for your post rather than adding some additional stock photography or memes. An often quoted statistic is that content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images, meaning relevance is just as important as quantity when measuring the effectiveness of blog imagery.

Because the blog post is already written, a good designer should be able to quickly understand your design needs and provide relevant, original imagery for your blog.

Start sharing

Image Courtesy of Freepik

With an arsenal of new visual assets, it’s time to spread the word (or in this case, image).

You can start by promoting on the obvious channels like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but it’s important to use these assets on platforms that were previously less viable to you when you just had a blog post.

Platforms like Tumblr and Pinterest are visual-centric and with a new set of interesting and relevant images, you can connect to an entirely new audience for the first time.

Remember to take a look at the performance of all the different visual assets to help prioritize your visual content marketing efforts in the future. Look at social metrics like shares and link clicks and web metrics like new visitors to get a better idea of what images contributed the most value to your content strategy.

You may not see a boost in performance immediately, but a consistent visual content marketing strategy will help strengthen your brand and ultimately put your business in front of more potential customers.

The post Repurpose Great Writing with Visual Content Marketing appeared first on crowdspring Small Business Resource Center.

These changes range from participation on new social networks, new technologies, and the increasingly popular content marketing.

But many companies are finding that there’s too much content – much of it not especially useful or actionable.

Customers and prospective customers are becoming overwhelmed with content – much of it is just noise.

These problems are made worse by changes made by Google and others in the way email is delivered.

There’s no question that content marketing is more difficult to execute effectively today.

Smart business owners and teams are looking for creative ways to lift their content marketing efforts without relying on email or other more overused techniques. That’s where influencer marketing can help.

Influencer marketing pushed itself to the front of many marketing strategies, and will continue to be an important marketing tactic.

While larger companies are already relying on influencers (60% of chief marketing officers plan to increase their influencer marketing budgets), startups and small businesses should also take advantage of this tactic.

We saw this when a company would partner with a celebrity like Kylie Jenner, and send Kylie free products in an exchange for an Instagram post. Kylie Jenner’s followers would see the post, and connect to the product by either following a social media account or purchasing the product. At an average cost of $50,000 per post, the company converted thousands of Jenner’s followers into customers.

This worked because Kylie Jenner has positioned her brand as being luxurious and desirable, attracting 82.6 million followers just on Instagram and netting over $28 million last year between her lip kits, modeling, TV appearances, and social media ads. Her success has skyrocketed over the past few years, exponentially growing the demand for sponsorships.

But influencer marketing has become more sophisticated recently to include not just pure celebrities, but also other types of influencers. Deirdre Breakenridge, CEO of Pure Performance Communications, defines influencer marketing in an interview for Prezly:

I look at it as ‘influence equals action’. It’s knowing there’s individuals that come in all different shapes and sizes, everyone from your own customers to bloggers, Twitter personalities, LinkedIn power-users, analysts and experts who are able to move the needle for you.

Similarly, Google discovered that certain content creators on YouTube had 3x as many views and 2x as many actions on sponsored content posts than celebrities.

These trends suggest that it would be smarter for companies to focus on influencers who best engage with their niche target audiences rather than just looking for general household names.

Here are five tips to get you started with influencer marketing.

1. Identify the right influencers.

Create a list of influencers who you find best engage with your target audience. Some might decline to work with you, so make sure you have enough names on that list to give you some options.

Find people in your industry that are trending on Twitter, being talked about on Facebook, or have the most followers on Instagram. Identify people who run the most popular blogs in your industry, or even who your competitors are using as their influencers and build off of those networks.

To find a high-quality influencer, look at engagement to make sure that the influencer isn’t just pushing content, but that they are also having conversations with their followers.

Expert Tip: Find an influencer whose recommendation you would personally trust. According to Nielsen, 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations as opposed to 33% trusting advertisements.

2. Align your influencer(s) with the right channel(s).

Make sure that you align your list of influencers with your preferred channels. This typically happens organically, since you should already be using the platform that your target audience is using.

Be wary of sponsoring content on channels that you are not involved in because it can create a disconnect with your target audience. For example, if you don’t have a presence on Instagram, it would be more difficult to reach that audience through an influencer on Instagram – but not impossible. It just requires more careful planning and strategy.

Expert Tip: Target influencers who have large followings on multiple social media channels so that the sponsored content can be cross-referenced.

3. Be clear on what you need from each influencer.

Whether it’s one paid post or a video series on YouTube, have a clear idea of how the influencer can help you.

Usually, the method of distribution is guided by the channel. While it’s common to have one-off sponsored posts across multiple social media channels, tactics like brand takeovers have become synonymous with Snapchat or Instagram Live, and Q&A sessions with Twitter.

Influencer marketing should always be backed by a specific focus, and the method of distribution has the power to vary that focus from a new announcement to a call to action of purchasing a product. Since influencers commonly help businesses, don’t be afraid to ask for their advice and leverage their experience to improve your campaigns and tactics.

Expert Tip: Use the channel of distribution to prime the influencers before you reach out to them by engaging with them. Repost, like, or comment on their content to start creating a deeper connection.

4. Reach out to the influencers.

Connect to the influencers to get the conversation started.

It’s important to introduce yourself and your company, and to briefly describe the mutual value that the partnership would provide. Also include your preferred method of compensation, whether it’s your product/service at a discounted (or free) rate, or a payment. Use clear, friendly language so that the outreach seems personal and not automated.

Follow up once in 2-3 days if the influencer hasn’t responded, but avoid filling up their inbox with emails, messages, or tweets. Unfortunately, you won’t always receive a response or agreement. When you do, keep the conversation going as you work with the influencer to refine the sponsored content for their audience.

Expert Tip: Reach out to the influencers through the social media you’d like them to use and through email to have a better chance at getting their attention and cutting through the noise. This will also help you assess how responsive each influencer is to their audience.

5. Follow through with an integrated strategy.

Once you have come to an agreement with an influencer and the sponsored content has been released, implement the action plan that you created around the campaign.

Analyze the traction that the sponsored content creates, or reach out to consumers that comment or share the content. It’s important to evaluate the efficacy of the content to inform your future influencer marketing strategy, and also to keep the content relevant so that you can reach the maximum number of consumers.

Expert Tip: Check out these tools for additional support for influencer campaign management.

Influencer marketing isn’t for everyone, but many businesses can benefit when they increase the power of their brand voice through influencers. A few smart influencer connections can let you speak to a much larger audience of potential customers.

The post How Influencer Marketing Can Pay Off for Small Businesses appeared first on crowdspring Small Business Resource Center.

As a business, you must promptly exhibit your product or service’s worth to potential customers while setting yourself apart from rivals.

Sometimes, the product or service can do this independently, but a powerful brand identity often tips the scales in your favor. Yet, amidst the hustle of product development and managing finances, brand identity tends to get sidelined.

However, brand identity matters. Immensely.

So, hitting the mark with that vital first impression is essential. In this guide, we’ve dissected brand identity into four core components to help you swiftly establish vital branding and get back to the nitty-gritty of your business.

Positioning statement

Kickstart your branding journey with a positioning statement – it lends your brand a raison d’être.

Also known as the value proposition, this statement is your answer to the question, “Why are we doing this?” and helps bridge the gap between your brand and its customers.

To craft an impactful positioning statement, let’s borrow a formula from Arielle Jackson’s book ‘Positioning,’ a lesson she picked up from Christopher Escher, former Head of Marketing and Communications at Google:

• For (target customer)
• Who (statement of need or opportunity),
• (Product name) is a (product category)
• That (statement of key benefit).
• Unlike (competing alternative)
• (Product name)(statement of primary differentiation)

For example, let’s apply this to Amazon:

• For World Wide Web visitors
• Who love books,
• Amazon is a retail bookseller
• That provides instant access to over 1.1 million books.
• Unlike traditional book retailers,
• Amazon offers unparalleled convenience, low prices, and extensive selection.

This template helps you describe your product or service simply yet effectively, paving the way for brand identity.

Business name

Choosing a business name for your startup can be one of the most challenging yet crucial steps in establishing brand identity.

Ensure your business name reflects your newly formed positioning statement and is memorable enough to secure a unique domain and social media handles.

Business tagline

A business tagline is a chance to convey your company’s positioning statement directly to the customer. Unlike the statement itself, taglines are succinct and emotionally charged.

A great tagline meets several simple criteria:

• Memorable
• Highlights a key benefit
• Differentiates the brand
• Instills positive feelings about the brand

It can be a daunting task to tick all these boxes in a fast-paced startup environment, but it’s integral to creating a compelling brand identity.

Company logo

An expertly designed company logo is instrumental in making that essential first impression.

When starting out, your logo could be the sole identifier of your business’s function or the only thing setting you apart in places like app stores and social media platforms.

So, how do you spot a quality logo? It’s usually:

• Simple
• Memorable
• Timeless
• Versatile
• Appropriate

These four pillars of brand identity will help your startup lay the groundwork for a comprehensive brand identity without diverting significant resources from core business operations.

The result? A brand identity that resonates with your target audience and makes your business truly unforgettable.

The post Unlocking Brand Identity: The Four Core Elements appeared first on crowdspring Small Business Resource Center.

Brand recognition might be minimal, your location could limit marketing options, and often you’re dealing with a tight marketing budget.

Many marketing experts suggest constructing comprehensive marketing plans. Although beneficial, especially as part of a business plan, marketing plans take considerable time, resources, and money — all of which may not be readily available for young businesses.

The truth is that most advertising and marketing don’t work.

Studies show that people ignore online ads, and other forms of advertising are not much better.

But marketing doesn’t always require hefty investments. Lean marketing can help you stretch your budget while efficiently reaching your target audience.

What is lean startup?

Before diving into the strategies, let’s demystify ‘lean startup.’ That term is frequently misused.

This term refers to a methodology used by entrepreneurs to develop products and services swiftly and affordably. It involves creating rapid prototypes, testing market assumptions, and leveraging customer feedback to enhance offerings.

The lean startup principle can be applied to marketing strategies, and that’s precisely what we’ll be doing.

Lean marketing strategies for your business

1. Testing in small batches

Micro advertising campaigns

Create small advertising campaigns with distinct goals and monitor their performance.

For example, use Facebook Ads to target a specific demographic in a small region. Set a budget, craft your message, and let it run for a short period. Measure the results, learn, and adapt for the next iteration.

We frequently run one to two-week campaigns to test ideas.

Multi-channel approach

Don’t limit your marketing efforts to just one channel. Test across different channels such as email marketing, social media, content marketing, or SEO.

For example, launch an email campaign alongside your social media strategy and observe which brings better engagement and conversions.

A/B testing

Experiment with different marketing materials for the same campaign to identify which performs better.

For example, create two versions of the subject line or content for an email campaign and see which one drives more opens or clicks.

We conduct subject line testing in nearly every email we send to clients and prospects and adjust future campaigns based on the results of those tests.

Testing different audiences

Try targeting different demographics or personas to understand which audience resonates best with your products and services.

For example, if you’re a fitness brand, you might test ads targeting college students in one campaign and working professionals in another.

Offer testing

Experiment with different offers or promotions to see what appeals most to your customers.

For instance, test a discount code against a bundled offer, and measure which drives more sales.

2. Listening to Your Customers

Social media polls and surveys

Leverage social media platforms to conduct quick polls or surveys.

Instagram Stories, for instance, offer a great way to gauge your audience’s preferences and opinions.

Reviews and feedback

Encourage customers to leave reviews on platforms like Yelp or Google My Business.

Regularly check these reviews to understand customer sentiment and identify areas for improvement.

Social listening

Use social media monitoring tools to track mentions of your brand, industry trends, or competitor activity. This can help you understand public perception and respond timely to any issues or opportunities.

We’re not as active on social media as we used to be when it comes to posting, but we’re much more attentive by listening.

User testing

If you’re developing a product or service, conduct user testing sessions to gather feedback. This could be a small group testing a new feature on your website or a trial run of a new product.

Email feedback

After a customer makes a purchase, send them an email asking for feedback on their experience. This can provide valuable insights and make customers feel valued and heard.

3. Learning Fast, Not Failing Fast

Continuous monitoring

Keep a close eye on all your marketing efforts, using analytics tools to gather data on campaign performance. This enables you to quickly identify what’s working and what’s not.

Rapid iterations

Based on the data you gather, make adjustments to your strategies.

For example, if video content generates more engagement, pivot to create more videos.

Embrace failures

Accept that not every marketing effort will be a success. Each failure is an opportunity to learn and improve your strategies.

For most marketing teams and us, most marketing campaigns result in failure. That’s normal and is the reason why we test so often.

Test small, scale big

Start with small-scale tests to limit risk. Once you identify a successful strategy, scale it up.

For instance, a small Google Ads campaign can be expanded once proven to drive results.

Consistent learning

Stay updated with the latest marketing trends and techniques. Regularly educate yourself and your team to ensure you’re constantly learning and improving. This could be through webinars, online courses, or industry conferences.

In your journey with lean marketing, remember that you may encounter a series of trials and errors. Even here at crowdspring, about 90% of the marketing tactics we try aren’t immediately successful. But we learn, recalibrate, and discover the strategies that truly resonate with our audience.

The beauty of lean marketing lies in its agility. You’re not staking everything on a singular, massive campaign. Instead, you’re launching smaller, nimble initiatives and gathering feedback from your customers continuously. It’s a dynamic process where you validate your assumptions swiftly, often within weeks or a few months.

This approach ensures you’re not stuck waiting years to evaluate the outcome of a single grand strategy like many competitors might do. Instead, you’re consistently learning, adjusting, and improving, keeping you on your toes and ready for success.

The post Maximizing Returns: Lean Marketing for Small Businesses and Startups appeared first on crowdspring Small Business Resource Center.