How to Responsibly Scale Your Marketing Strategy (& Avoid a Mess)

It's usually a look of panic. 

Our sales team gets a prospect talking about their marketing (or lack thereof) and they quickly begin to realize that their traditional marketing efforts don't support sustained growth.

However, they're quick to express their apprehension towards inbound because they don't think they have the time or bandwidth to support modern initiatives. 

Truth be told, they're wrong. 

We're a one pizza size marketing team. 
 
A marketing director, a content marketing manager, and a designer/developer hybrid (sounds like a modern-day spin on the final scene of The Breakfast Club, doesn't it?)
 
However, with just 6 hands on deck, we've managed to continuously scale our marketing strategy to help us meet and exceed ambitious goals. 

So if you're serious about building out a marketing strategy capable of sustaining growth for your business, here's our best advice. 

Make things repeatable

One of the most fundamental parts of streamlining and scaling your marketing is identifying and eliminating inefficiencies.

Take a look at your current process for something as everyday as sending an email. Rather than pouring time into formatting your emails from scratch, templates make it easy to plug in new content and go. 
 
Shareable social media images? Ebooks? Blog posts? Slidedecks? Make them repeatable. 
 
Not only will this help you save time, but it also makes it easier to maintain consistent branding across multiple platforms.
 
The more uniform your posts are, the more likely viewers will be to remember and recognize your business the next time they see a piece of your content.
 
Actionable tip: start with these free sales email templates.  

Build a library of assets

Content marketing assets like ebooks and blog posts are the gifts that keep on giving.
 
Unlike traditional marketing initiatives like paid advertising, content marketing assets contribute to a sustainable growth strategy. 

While this isn't something you'll be able to put into effect over night, there are strategies that make building up a library of assets less laborious. 

For example, let's say you work for a project management software company. You already have 4-5 blog posts about best practices for collaborating with a team, so why not bind them together?

With little to no heavy lifting, you'll have an ebook that you can gate to give away in exchange for a visitor's contact information. 

The more premium content you have, the easier it is to align a blog article with a related offer. This contributes to a more optimized conversion path, as the alignment between the page's subject matter and the call-to-action is often times what drives people to click. 

Test everything

Having the ability to test your audience's behavior before committing to a particular design or bit or content ultimately increases the possibility of success.
 
While you may think that the content you have in place is performing really well, it could be working better.
 
Point being, if you don't test it, you'll never know. 
 
Rather than pour budget into marketing efforts that are destined to fall flat, enlist a plan for measuring and analyzing everything you try. 

Uncovering tiny truths as to why you website visitors are converting (or not converting) on certain pieces of content has the ability to yield big results. 

Not to mention, it helps transform the content creation process into something that is based less on what "you think" and more on what "you know." A change that has the power to absolve doubt and improve the user experience. 

Throw away bad habits

Ever feel like every time your business takes a step forward, there's always something there to knock you back a couple steps?
 
It's like you're stuck in a perpetual cha-cha.
 
The resistance to move forward (and stay there) is often a reflection of your own bad habits. 
 
You write an awesome, educational ebook and start feeling like you hit the nail on the head, until you get a nasty email from a reader who uncovered a handful of dated statistics.
 
See ya later, credibility.
 
Start by considering what's holding you back. Where do your weaknesses lie? What challenges is your team facing?

Suffering from a fear of failure? Rather than continue to allow your apprehension to keep you from exploring anything other than the ordinary, start by making small changes.

Seeing positive results from change (even small ones) will help you to overcome your reluctance to experiment.

From here, you can build up the confidence to do something as sacrilege as removing the sidebar from your blog (and live to tell the tale.)