In most small to mid-sized businesses, the owner often wears too many hats – chief executive, visionary, head of sales, marketer and chief bottle washer. In order to grow any business, you need time to concentrate on revenue generating activities and significantly decrease the time spent on non-income activities (which includes administration of any kind).
Like any other SMB, marketing is a critical part to getting recognized and to sell your products or services. Often, SMBs turn to some type of email communications/marketing – most often using Constant Contact for email newsletters – but the truth is, that’s a one-way push from the company to their target audience. And, not much of the process is simplified as you still have to manually enter in information into a contact management database among other things. Many SMBs will make the argument that you can track open rates, but what are you really tracking? The open rate doesn’t tell how interested the individual is, where he/she will go for more information, if the communiqué is forwarded and other details that will allow the SMB to re-target and customize additional communications.
Here’s what we would suggest you look for in a communications vehicle:
- Find a tool that allows you to create an ongoing dialogue with your customers with the ability to segment and target different groups within the audience to customize your communications.
- Ease-of-use for your audience to
- share information with their circle of friends, family and professional acquaintances
- select how they would like to obtain information – from email to SMS to Facebook
- easily move information from a non-permanent media (online or email) to their permanent media – Outlook calendars, Google and Yahoo! online calendars, etc. – and into their lives.
- The ability to integrate into social networks and easily manage all communications (Let’s face it. Businesses need social network marketing, but it can be a major time sucker! Find a tool that streamlines the whole process)
- A robust tracking function that allows SMBs to gage the level of interest in the products, services or events/activities based on interactivity through a website, email, SMS, etc.
- Streamlined management of all electronic communications, period.
