In the world of marketing, there are many different marketing strategies but to be successful, most companies will need some kind of technology. The question is, what technology makes sense for you and your current marketing strategy? In other words, does your marketing technology really fit you, or are you trying to wear something to small or too large?
To explore this question let’s take a look at the Teradata Integrated Marketing Cloud, which has the ambition to serve many different types of marketing technologies. By looking at what Teradata offers small businesses (SMBs), we can understand your marketing technology fit.
Dressing Up the Startup and Small Business
For startups and small businesses, the first step in marketing is developing a great product or service and making customers happy. Any marketer worth their salt will acknowledge that there are many companies that had very little marketing prowess, did almost no marketing besides working on the product, and achieved great success.
But for the vast majority of companies (and almost all B2B companies), marketing is a key activity that gets the word out and generates revenue, thereby increasing the value of the company. If you are an overnight success, you may not need marketing. Everybody else does.
As we pointed out in our survivor’s guide blog series, companies first realize they need marketing once they have exhausted their collective rolodexes. After you have called everyone your staff knows, your board knows, and your early customers know, now you need a marketing program.
Like most marketing programs, your first marketing program will seek to:
- Drive awareness, convey your product promise, and your fulfillment of that promise
- Create relationships so that you can continue nurture them
- Understand from that communication when people are ready to buy
- Get in touch directly to accelerate a sale
Even at this early stage, you should consider marketing, mostly with respect to your website, email marketing, lead generation, and content creation.
Keeping it Cheap and Cheerful
For the SMB, the marketer is frequently asked to be a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to executing marketing campaigns. These marketers often look to leverage digital channels due to low costs. Additionally, these marketers will leverage cloud solutions to avoid infrastructure costs and provide flexibility to try new and innovative ideas.
Startup marketing 101 playbook:
- Ensure your website explains what you do and how you solve buyers problems
- Create SEO friendly and educational blogs for your prospects and promote the blogs via social media
- Offer an email newsletter to capture email addresses for your mailing list
- Provide ungated content, but put one or two valuable assets behind registration to build your mailing list
- Keep track of how your customers find out about you
- Use your network to secure article placements or work with a lone-wolf PR firm
Support marketing 101 playbook with the Teradata Integrated Marketing Cloud:
- Email Marketing – manage email delivery and response
- Mobile Marketing – send SMS and, for more advanced marketers, leverage push messaging to engage on apps
- Social Marketing – listen and monitor conversations as well as publish content
- Web Marketing – use other channels to engage and drive to landing pages to continue the engagement
- Content Management – manage and publish content across channels
The Right Fit Promotes Learning
The marketing team at a startup or SMB is busy and often understaffed. The role of the team is to coordinate all of this marketing activity. Coordination happens through email or a task management system. The point is to take the actions listed in the playbook above and measure the results so that you learn from what you’ve done.
In the next blog, we will explore how to size-up your mid-market marketing technology fit.
Get more b2b marketing perspectives from Evolved Media.
