Flexible working, an agile workforce, going plural, OBW (outcome-based working) – there’s no doubt that the employment practices are undergoing a period of rapid change. Covid has led to further acceptance of the hybrid working model. The office based 40 hour week is increasingly becoming a thing of the past. This in turn is leading to business owners reassessing how they bring essential skills into their organisation.
One of the challenges that ambitious SME’s face is how to build an effective, robust marketing capability on what is usually too small a budget. And nowhere are the benefits of accessing an agile workforce, who provide an activity-based contribution, felt more than when an SME is looking to develop a multi-disciplined team.
Similarly, the business to business buying process is moving and moving fast. When you’re ambitious for growth and looking to identify new prospects, you can’t just fill a room full of cold callers and expect to get the job done. It’s not how our prospects buy from us anymore. And we need to be buyer aligned.
We need to recognise that buyers will try to introduce sellers in to their buying process much later than they used to. It’s the sellers who still manage to get involved at an early stage who will achieve the most success….
Let’s take a step back and consider why the need for effective marketing is more and more important. Increasingly the business community is buying products and services the way we are buying personally. In fact, let’s take a step further back still and recognise that none of us buy our own stuff the way we did ten years ago or even as we did before lockdown.
The creep of the online market place already pervasive, has gone bananas – whether you’re ordering replacement electric toothbrush heads from Amazon or arranging that same day essential item of clothing from ASOS or Net-A-Porter
Often when we want something, we do a little research. And that research now usually takes place online. We read reviews, compare prices, take counsel from friends and colleagues. There’s a huge amount of information available, its conveniently presented, its often fun, sometimes addictive. When temperatures are below freezing or the tarmac’s melting it’s definitely more convenient than traipsing into town and doing your homework there.
We are signalling our buying intent…
Given that these buying behaviours are now so ingrained in our personal lives its hardly surprising that the same behaviours now pervade our business lives. Apart from the intelligence we get delivered by a simple search request of google, we have LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Glassdoor, Trustpilot – the list goes on….
All very interesting I hear you say, but how does this information help us to get more leads for the sales team? Well a common definition of marketing is that it is “helping people find and buy your product or service”. And the more you help, the more they will buy right? So, the more information about you, your team and your products and services that is located conveniently for people to access is good right…?
And wow! what a range of places we need to place that helpful information. And what a range of skills we need to get it there. Because we know that our customers don’t just want a specification of what they’re going to get. They want a high-level summary of the benefits (a blog?), a more detailed technical analysis (a whitepaper?), they might want to know if it (or you?) looks right (visuals?), who else has it (case studies?), what do they think and which of your team impressed(testimonials?). And you need a great website too.
Well that’s ok because you probably have all the information they need somewhere and you can probably find all the people you need, with their various skills, to get it into a tidy state and so at some point you can take your learnings from your private life and apply them to your business life.
Except of course you have a day job, and although you can identify potential employees you don’t have the expertise to identify the good ones. Furthermore, it’s not just one. You need access to a full range of marketing disciplines including:
- Copy writing
- Blog creation
- Brand development
- Data management
- Marketing automation
- Web design
- SEO
So, you need a marketing team. But you don’t need a team all day every day. You need a team that will drop in and out of your cost structure as your requirements dictate. You need agile workers, task-based workers who won’t even necessarily work from your premises. You need an entirely outcome-based relationship with your marketing team because you don’t want marketing at all.
WHAT YOU ACTUALLY WANT IS LEADS. But the only companies you can find who talk about lead generation are telemarketing agencies and you know you don’t just want to pay for people to cold call on your behalf.
At Reach Revenue we provide a cost-effective solution to this business problem. If we wanted to sound posh, we would describe it as “marketing as a service”, which it is. But in the more singular parlance of time-poor business leaders its outsourced, fixed price, lead generation.
We will work with you to understand your objectives and we will create a plan to meet those objectives. We will incorporate input from the various marketing disciplines that you need to deliver a lean, efficient service designed to supplement your existing capability. We will provide the service at a fixed monthly cost. We will report back to you on a monthly basis, our reporting focusses on results not just activity.
To find out how we can help you, please call 0203 858 8030 or email info@reachrevenue.net