When you’re planning your marketing, you need a mixture of three key resources – time, skill & money To get the results you want from your marketing requires a careful balancing of these three key resources. Here’s how you balance your resources to keep your marketing working well.
Time & marketing skills
In a perfect world you will have all the marketing skills and knowledge you need, and the time to use them, available within your business. You’re doing your marketing well and the leads are coming into your business.
A common starting point for many early-stage businesses, simply because the money isn’t there. You make use of the skill you have to generate the early growth you’re looking for.
But what happens when one of these starts becoming scarcer?
Running out of time
Your early marketing was effective, generating leads that led to sales. Now you have to deliver on those sales, and that takes time. As time is limited for all of us, it has to come from somewhere – usually marketing!
Running out of skills
Marketing is constantly evolving. Thirty years ago, the Yellow Pages, networking and direct mail ruled the roost. Then along came websites and Google Adwords (now called Google Ads) and email marketing. In the last decade or so, social media is at the forefront, alongside other digital marketing channels. Has your knowledge kept up?
You’re running your business, meaning other jobs take priority. There simply isn’t time for you to maintain your marketing skillset.
Adding budget
When your time and skill resources dwindle, but you need to keep the leads coming in, you have to add the final key resource – money.
But that is also a finite resource, often a limited one. But you need to add budget to top up the time and skills you have to reach the levels you need.
Here’s what you need to do to ensure you’re using the right balance of these key resources…
1. Assess Your Current Skills and Resources
At every size of business, before calculating the budget you will need, you need a clear understanding of the marketing strengths and weaknesses within your business. Identify which marketing tasks you can handle efficiently and which tasks are beyond the expertise within the business or would consume too much time. At a minimum level do you have:
- Copywriting skills, for blogs, brochures and social posts
- Graphic design skills
- Website management/maintenance skills, so you can update your own website
- Networkers, able to develop relationships with people without always trying to sell to them
- The ability to properly assess the marketing performance
As you develop your marketing plan, you will identify other skills that are needed.
2. Determine your marketing strategy and develop your plan
Truly understanding the skills and resources available within your business helps you to develop the right marketing strategy for your small business. Over the years we have seen many businesses limit their marketing activities because they’re worried about costs. If you know that some of the marketing can be done in-house, you know your costs will be lower.
Developing a marketing strategy that only uses the skills and time available within your business will lead to missed opportunities and a lack of growth. This will only get worse over time as the marketing landscape evolves, but the skills don’t keep up.
3. Where are the gaps?
Once you have a plan, identifying the gaps is relatively simple. Plugging the gaps is then about finding the right mix of expertise and technology
- What marketing technology can give you back time?
- Social media platforms such as Publer or Hootsuite
- Email marketing tools, such as Mailchimp
- Performance reporting tools such as Google Analytics or SEMrush
- Who are the marketing specialists who can provide the expertise in other areas, perhaps PPC or PR, maybe SEO or email marketing
Complementing internal skills with external expertise and technology delivers both the quality and quantity of marketing your business needs to hit your marketing targets and business goals. You don’t need to outsource everything. Prioritise high-skill, time-intensive tasks that will make the biggest impact on your marketing strategy.
The third of the key resources, money, is what enables the gaps to be filled. Wise choices in these areas will deliver a great ROI and be a good investment for your business.
4. Review and Reallocate Regularly
Regularly reviewing your marketing performance is key to maintaining the right balance of resources. Monitor your marketing performance and assess whether the budget, time, and skills allocated are producing the desired results.
If certain areas are under-performing, changes can be made. If the under-performing areas are being delivered by external resource, changing supplier is far easier than replacing or upskilling internal staff
Conclusion
The right balance of time, skill and money will deliver the results you are looking for, so approach this in a careful, strategic way. By assessing your team’s skills, outsourcing when necessary, making good use of automation tools, and continuously reviewing your marketing performance, you can create a marketing strategy that maximises efficiency and results.
