For marketers and business owners, expanding your brand’s reach is essential for success.
The challenge lies in finding effective ways to do more with less—limited budgets, resources, and people—all while navigating an increasingly uncertain economic landscape. How can you rise to meet this triple challenge?
Let’s dive into the top 5 strategies that will empower you to thrive in business and amplify marketing impact, without stretching your budget.
As a bonus: we’ve included an on-demand recording of our recent Small Business Growth Series virtual event, featuring Renée Chaplin, VP – APAC, Constant Contact and Dominique Lamb, Queensland Small Business Commissioner. Dominique shares the key takeaways from a report into the life cycle and the mindset of small businesses and how to achieve stability as a business owner.
Setting the Scene: Market Insights
As part of Constant Contact’s recent Small Business Now report, 1300 small business owners were surveyed across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the US and Canada to help uncover the realities facing people in business today.
The survey shows that ANZ SMB owners, like most people, are generally time poor, with 59% always or regularly procrastinating on marketing tasks.
- 58% are spending less than one hour per day on marketing
- 83% are concerned about the current climate of economic uncertainty
- 50% are spending less than $15k per year on marketing (with some as low as $1500)
This makes growing a business difficult in any economic environment, but what can business owners and marketers do to keep growing?
Marketing Insight #1: Personalise and Humanise your Brand
Strong connections are the foundation of your business. Connect with people where they are, ask questions and understand what they need, at the right time.
Conducting your own market research through surveys and industry insights will help you get the inside story. Then, it’s up to you to personalise your product or service to provide the solution. Don’t forget to speak like a human, not a brand.
Marketing Insight #2: Experiment with AI and Marketing Technology
The benefit of technology is its ability to make our lives easier, with 60% of SMBs already adopting AI in their business and 85% seeing a positive impact on the efficiency of their marketing.
Of course, any change can be scary, especially when you don’t have the time or skills to get started. It can help to think of AI as a new employee and learn how to work together over time. Stop procrastinating and delegate time-consuming tasks to AI and marketing automation, creating more energy to work on your business rather than in it.
Content generation has never been easier than it is now. Make AI and marketing automation work for your business and remember, technology is only as good as the person using it. Ask the right questions and personalise any AI generated content to keep it relevant and ‘human’.
- Try this: Each month, experiment with automating a business process or task with AI. Break it into small steps and map it out, whilst playing to your strengths and using AI as a resource. For example, you could start by following your customer journey from awareness to action and using these insights to create a new Welcome Email automation. Of course, you can also join an upcoming Power Session to upskill in marketing automation, in less than 20-minutes.
Marketing Insight #3: Build Serious Brand Loyalty and Business Trust
Growth is about more than just revenue. Every human touchpoint has the potential to enhance your brand value, build business trust, and extend your reach.
- Try this: Understanding what drives loyalty and trust is key. Tap into customer insights to create a valuable “how-to” guide or checklist. Ask for permission to connect, and leverage SMS—where open rates can reach up to 98%—to engage customers in real time and strengthen your business relationships with both customers and industry partners.
People do business with people they know, like and trust. So, give them a reason, value and urgency to support your business through its evolution, as highlighted in our recent Small Business Growth session.
Watch On-Demand: Fireside Chat and Live Q&A
“Small businesses want to thrive… They want their profitability to be strong. But growth doesn’t necessarily mean employing more people… becoming bigger, spending lots of money, doing lots of things. It could actually mean getting efficiencies within their business, whether that’s via marketing, whether that’s the use of AI.”
Dominique Lamb, Queensland Small Business Commissioner
- Want to hear more insights from Dominique Lamb? Check out the Queensland Small Business Commissioner’s new podcast series: ‘Small Business Big Stories‘, exploring the entrepreneurial spirit and personal journeys of small business owners.
Marketing Insight #4: Always Remember Your Why
How are you communicating the ‘why this’, ‘why now’ and ‘why you’ of your business?
In a crowded business world, it’s difficult to stand out. So, it’s essential to remember your business purpose, ideal target market and how you can help them. Many businesses lose sight of the reasons they started amidst the day-to-day challenges of operating a business.
- Try this: Putting your mission front and centre can become your greatest driving force and competitive advantage. Vision and shared values will attract the right people to your business and help to craft a winning brand identity.
Marketing Insight #5: Develop an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy
Each channel is an opportunity to connect your business with different people.
Diversify your marketing and expand into social, SMS, and web that seamlessly integrates together. Don’t forget that customer service, collaboration and consistent messaging are important communication channels in your marketing toolkit.
Find out how to create a winning omnichannel strategy, it’s the best way to extend your reach and scale your business.
Where to Next: Future Growth
The reality is, everyone has the same 24 hours in each day. If you want to take your marketing from surviving to thriving, there’s no better time to learn how to use market research, customer insights and technology to free up your time and energy.
To recap, here’s the top strategies to focus on to amplify marketing impact:
1: Personalise and Humanise your Brand
2: Experiment with AI and Marketing Technology
3: Build Brand Loyalty and Business Trust
4: Remember Your Why
5: Omnichannel Marketing Strategy
The end result? You can make working on your business (not in it) a priority, no matter how small the budget or limited the resources.
Remember, we’re here to help you grow, so subscribe to our eNews below to join us as part of future conversations in our Small Business Growth Series.
Reports mentioned in this article:
