Why Work with a Marketing Professional?

Working with a marketing agency, consultant, or hiring a marketing person has advantages for your business. The most basic reason to work with an experienced professional is that they are specialists in their field.

You hire an accountant because they know the applicable tax laws and best practices for handling numbers. A good accountant brings a wealth of knowledge. It’s the same for marketing, branding, and communications. A good marketer has the skills to increase your bottom line and help you realize your goals.

We hire accountants for another reason, too – accounting is time-consuming. Developing, executing, and analyzing marketing campaigns require as much time and often more time than crunching numbers. In both cases, working with professionals frees up your time and delivers the skills your business needs to succeed.

Let’s look at 5 ways a marketing professional can help your business.

Identify Goals

Identifying goals is trickier than it sounds. When we first speak with business owners, we often find that entrepreneurs know high-level goals such as wanting more customers or wanting to build their brand. But that’s not nearly specific enough. After all, more customers can mean several things:

• Attracting new customers
• Increasing sales from existing customers
• Adding new products or services
• Increasing margins on existing offers

So what does the business owner really want? Do they need more customers, or are they looking for an increase in profitability? It might not be obvious at first, but those two things aren’t necessarily connected.

A good marketing professional will work with you to identify your pain points and your frustrations. They will draw out what is really happening with your business and help you identify specific goals that need to be achieved.

Conduct Research

Knowing your industry, local market, and target customer are vital to every successful marketing strategy. A marketing professional will conduct research and interpret the collected data specifically for your business. This information will then be used to develop a plan specific to your goals, to drive results.

Develop Marketing Plans

Marketing and communications are more than setting up your social media accounts and creating a website. Marketing plans are created through a process and should be actionable living documents that don't live on a shelf.

A good marketing professional will develop a marketing and communications plan that combines a variety of methods to help you reach your targeted audience. These plans will:

• Paint a picture of your clients through buyer personas
• Provide you with clear messaging and imagery to deliver through marketing
• Help set the tone of your brand's story
• Provide actionable steps in a logical order you can follow
• Help you make clear marketing purchase decisions with a budget
• Set you up to measure the results so you know what's working

When done right, your marketing and communications plan can be a living document that guides you towards success.

Execute the Marketing Plan

A successful marketing campaign is executing the marketing plan while staying on budget, measuring the results and making adjustments along the way.

Working within the constraints of the marketing plan is where a marketing professional truly shines. Every marketing plan could use more of something a business may not have, and it's usually the money available to spend on campaigns. Successful marketers find creative ways to execute the marketing plan to get results while working with available resources.

Increase Your Understanding

While this is more in the domain of business consulting, a good marketing professional will take the time to help you learn along the way. Increasing your understanding of marketing and promotions will make you a more well-rounded business owner.

During the development and execution of your marketing plan, you will gain a better understanding of where and how your business makes money. Armed with this new knowledge, you can explore opportunities for growth, pricing strategies, or new products and services that will resonate with your customers. Increasing your understanding helps set the foundation for continued growth and success.

Fractional CMO

Do you feel like your business is missing opportunities? Do you feel like your marketing and promotions efforts are not helping you reach your goals?

It’s time to end random marketing activities that don’t deliver results! We can help you understand how to take your business to the next level! From developing marketing plans to partnering on the execution and delivering your brand's story – we will be in your corner.

Fractional CMO is for any organization where hiring a full-time marketing person or contracting with a marketing/advertising agency isn’t cost-effective or doesn’t meet your needs. Get the flexibility you need through our Fractional CMO service!

Contact us today to chat about how to improve your marketing and promotions and grow your bottom line.