Marketing Your Business Before a Marketer is on Your Team

Small businesses have to maximize every investment and every resource to grow. Acquiring new customers is a priority with or without a team member dedicated solely to sales or marketing. If you want to grow, sales and marketing cannot wait.

So, what do you do if you don’t have the time to do-it-yourself and don’t have the money to hire someone else? We’re going to tell you.

In this episode, Amy Appleton, BELAY’s Director of Marketing, and I will be talking about how to market your business without a marketing person on your team by introducing a strategy referred to as ‘marketing by committee.’ She is going to help you leverage your existing resources to market and grow your organization.

Here are some takeaways she shared:

1. Grow from where you are. 

Most business owners hesitate or fail to market their business for one of four reasons:

1. 1. They believe customers will find them as long as they create a great product or provide excellent service. 

   2. The business owner doesn’t have enough time to serve customers, lead the team, and market the business. 

   3. The company doesn’t have enough money to hire marketing help.

   4. Marketing isn’t the business owner’s expertise so they don't know what to do.

Sales fuel the growth of your organization, which means you must start marketing your business where you are with what you have and what you know to become what you envision in the future. Don’t wait. Get in the marketing game.

If you can’t afford to hire a marketing employee or agency, distribute the marketing tasks you’re doing to your internal team. More on that next.

2. Get your team to buy into the bigger idea.

Anytime you ask somebody to do something, you need to start with the why. For consistent growth, sales and marketing is not just an option.

In small businesses, it’s common for one team member to do multiple jobs as the company gets off the ground. You can also share the responsibilities of one job with multiple people. However, it’s important for them to view their assignment as more than another task on their to-do list; it’s the way in which the organization will grow and take better care of them. 

Getting your team to have this perspective requires getting them to buy-in. To gain buy-in, Amy recommends you use principles:

• • Know your team. Identify the team members that have extra capacity, respond well to challenging assignments, enjoy the variety of a side project or show an aptitude for marketing.

  • Start with the why. Tell each team member why you’re enlisting their help and why their marketing assignment is important to the organization.

  • Acknowledge what’s in it for them. Whether it be recognition, new work experiences or one-on-one mentorship, lean in to what will motivate that person and find a way to provide it.

  • Find something for them to stop doing. Automate, delegate or eliminate something previously on their plate to permanently free up their capacity. The key would be to make the tradeoff decisions as the leader to avoid overwhelming your team.

3. Don’t add too much too soon.

It’s easy to overwhelm your team when you’re asking them to step outside of their comfort zone and add more work to their plate. Give them the best opportunity to succeed. 

Maximize your team’s effort and your ROI by limiting what you work on and focusing on a few marketing channels and initiatives at a time. Be sure to first delegate tasks you’re currently doing so you, the leader, are freed up to drive the organization’s growth. 

What’s on your list today is likely what you’re going to feel most confident training your team to do.

Consider the answers to these questions when thinking how your marketing efforts are structured and what’s next for your organization:

What marketing tasks should you consider delegating or automating? Consider any tasks you find yourself doing on a daily, weekly or monthly recurring basis.

Which of your existing team members have extra capacity, demonstrated appreciation for challenging assignments or variety in their work, or shown an aptitude for — or interest in — marketing? Assuming you were going to distribute all of your existing marketing tasks to these individuals, outline what you’d assign to each person.

What’s one marketing channel or initiative you would explore if your organization had more capacity?

As a next step, define and delegate marketing responsibilities to current team members with this week’s guide The Wheel of Marketing. 

This is a marketing task delegation tool outlining the core functions and responsibilities of marketing, and it walks you through a simple process of divvy things up to guarantee everything is covered.

And then, when you're ready to get back to what called you into business in the first place, hand over your marketing to a BELAY Marketing Assistant!