What Can A Small Business Marketing Firm Do For You?
Small businesses often underestimate the importance of proper digital marketing. Few know that they can seek help in this area through a business and marketing strategy consulting firm. Even less know what exactly these firms do and how they can help.
In this guide, we’ll discuss exactly what a firm like Stillwell+Co can do within the realm of digital marketing, explore a few of the options that can be offered, and see why digital marketing is so important to a growing small business.
What Is A Business and Marketing Strategy Consulting Firm?
A business and marketing strategy consulting firm focuses on helping small businesses in day-to-day business and marketing activities.
They usually work one on one with a business owner. They can have incredibly varied roles; the exact tasks they carry out are typically dependent on the individual needs of the business and the exact marketing plan they have set in place. One of the main places they can focus on is digital marketing.
Ultimately, tasks performed by these firms can cover anything related to promoting the small business’s brand and guiding the business towards growth. In this guide, we will cover the areas within digital marketing that these firms normally work within. Some of the most common tasks can include:
Content writing
Social media management
PPC
Analytics reporting
SEO
Email marketing
Content Writing & Curation
A business and marketing strategy consulting firm can help with a wide range of content creation tasks for a business. Effective content writing is essential for any business, as poorly written content can damage your overall reputation for search engine results, social media algorithm changes, and other ways you represent yourself and your business online.
Writing website content, product descriptions, blog posts, and content for promotional materials are all common tasks for one of these firms. In curating the content, the firm will work diligently to understand the business’s preferences on the tone of voice, style, and feel of the content.
Social Media Management
Social media management is a common addition to any to-do list in the socially connected and largely online modern world in which we live. Almost all businesses are involved with some form of social media and the ones that are not are potentially missing a highly valuable prospective audience.
A business and marketing strategy consulting firm commonly helps manage social media channels, scheduling new updates, answering messages, interacting with your audience, and generally ensuring that the platform is run according to the company’s social media plan. If there is not a plan in place, a firm will work to guide and create the strategy and execution thereafter. This important piece of the marketing puzzle may look different for each business and industry, but packs a powerful and low-cost punch to your promotional plan.
PPC: Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click campaigning is a popular way for businesses to get noticed quickly and increase their traffic acquisition. A business and marketing strategy consulting firm can help to run a wide range of PPC campaigns, including Google AdWords and social media PPC.
With a campaign in place, a firm will work alongside you to amend/manage the budget, find new keywords, set new target audiences, write different ad copy and monitor the success of ads throughout the month in order to constantly improve a business’s return on investment.
Analytics Reporting
One of the most valuable services a business and marketing strategy consulting firm can provide is analytics reporting. Websites, social media channels, and PPC campaigns all have tools available that allow you to collect important and useful data which can turn into customer intelligence like no other.
The data the firms can gather give businesses valuable insights into how well certain things are performing, alert to any potential issues, and look at further steps the business may want to take in the future. These firms can sift through raw data and compile weekly or monthly reports that tell the client how their money is guiding new customers into the door. The best and most reliable firms are extremely transparent with results both good and bad, allowing the client to understand course corrections as well as strong performance indicators.
SEO: Search Engine Optimization
Business and marketing strategy consulting firms can help with on-page Search Engine Optimization or SEO tasks, which is often executed through a solid content strategy. Ensuring certain keywords and links are naturally placed throughout the content and the text is well-written, informative, and has value to the reader all increase the equity with which your brand grows online.
They can also help with the manual outreach involved in building backlinks, a valuable resource that helps businesses increase status in Google rankings by reaching out to blogs and influencers in order to write guest posts that link back to your website. With ever-changing algorithmic preferences and desires, a strategy firm will work diligently to ensure that your brand is consistently refreshed and meeting these demands for search equity.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is an age-old format of marketing where businesses send newsletters or promotional emails to members of a mailing list. Content may include announcements or service updates, or a content strategy focused on lifestyle themes may also make up the project outline. Either way, it remains an extremely effective tool for achieving yet another touch point with your audience.
The firms can design the email, write the content, schedule its release and then analyze the open and click data to improve on future campaigns. They can also do A/B testing where 2 selections of the mailing list get two slightly different emails so you can see which one performs better.
How Can We Benefit a Small Business?
Now that we’ve answered the title question, it can be seen that there can be many benefits to a small business by finding the right fit of a strategy firm for them. Marketing is a key part of growth for a business as it helps your brand to gain more recognition in the wider market, but crucially increases the number of leads that a business sees come through their doors.
A business and marketing strategy consulting firm can support a small business in a wide range of digital marketing activities. There are so many avenues available to marketing a business and therefore so much work to be done, meaning a business and marketing strategy consulting firm can be an incredibly valuable asset. By creating efficiency, increasing your available budget through solid return on investment, and managing effectiveness of your marketing activities, a firm like Stillwell+Co works to drive long-term and lifetime value.
Create Efficiency
One of the best things about a business and marketing strategy consulting firm is that they save a small business a lot of time and energy. Marketing is time-consuming, with tasks like analytics and content writing, social media, and PPC taking up considerable amounts of time. In addition, when marketing is an add-on task for a person that manages other portions of the business, it can be an arduous task that takes more time than it should. One of these firms can do these things for a small business so that the business owner and staff members have more time to focus on other things. This can also create efficiency where time is money!
Increase Budget Availability
A business and marketing strategy consulting firm can also save businesses money in the long run. This ties into the last point: the more effective the marketing strategy, the better the return on investment will be. With one of these firms running a business’s marketing it means that the owner can dedicate time to priority items while knowing their money is well spent and effective.
Effectiveness in Results
A business and marketing strategy consulting firm knows the best tactics and practices within the marketing world, meaning that a business’s campaigns will be much more effective. By consistently tracking data points and key performance indicators, the effectiveness of a well-planned strategy skyrockets. The business grows, seeing more customers through the door, meaning more revenue, leading to a larger budget and the opportunity for additional internal growth measures.
