You've no doubt read articles praising influencer marketing over the past few years - and indeed, they do help small businesses. Find the right influencer target audience and you'll get a lot of exposure.
However, there are some risks involved, mostly falling into influencers for not having a truly engaged audience. b2b email list If you plan to use influencer marketing as part of your strategy, you need to learn how to spot fakes. First, follower count obviously matters, but the real money is in engagement rates, especially comments. You can quickly find the engagement of any user with a free tool like Phlanx, and keep in mind that the industry standard is 1-3%.
4. You will be forced to automate
As you grow, one of the b2b email list biggest concerns will be your process - how to speed up the process, reduce unnecessary steps, and avoid hiccups. Automation can solve many of these problems, but there are often trade-offs that cost money. In many cases, it's well worth it.
Marketing automation can simplify your life by simply creating a drip email stream to your customers, or crafting smart, creative ads targeting your audience.
5. You still have to hire someone eventually
Good control freak, this one is especially for you. At a certain level of success and growth, you can no longer complete every task yourself. In fact, you won't need to perform a ton of tasks, and your business will continue to be in good shape – in fact, it will probably do better because you'll be able to shift your focus to the things that really matter.
However, this also comes at a price. You'll constantly be faced with the question: is it worth the extra time to come back? There's no easy answer to this, but if you find yourself unable to focus on an important area of your business because you're stuck taking stock of inventory, filling orders, answering emails, or any other mundane task, it might be time to escalate if you can. .
Ideally, you'll hire someone who can make up for your weaknesses. Maybe you're not the best copywriter and want others to write your email newsletter or write well-worded social media posts. Maybe you prefer to deal with product design and not worry about optimizing your blog's rankings; if so, then you should probably hire an agency to do the SEO for you.
One way or another, you're going to have to give up control. Just a little at first, and as you gain trust in the people you hire and the size of your business, you can let it go.
6. Omnichannel will help you scale, but it can also bring headaches
More platforms, more questions. No doubt it's hard enough to keep up with all the best practices, algorithm changes and updates of one platform, and as you grow you may start experimenting with new platforms - but you'll also run into headaches with omnichannel Marketing and Sales.
The important thing to remember is that you have to balance meeting the expectations of that platform, while also keeping multiple platforms cohesive. In other words, your Amazon store should meet all the requirements of a good Amazon store, but still feel like it's coming from "you" to your customers. Don't confuse them when switching between channels, they should be able to easily access everything from wherever you want.
Rather than just thinking about the customer experience within each platform in a silo, consider the customer’s entire journey.
7. Platform policies will drive you crazy
Each platform you interact with will have its own way of doing things and a set of rules you can follow. The more you gain, the more you need to worry about those rules - and how others can break them to take advantage of your success (or try to take them away).
For example, Google clearly states in its terms of service that companies are not allowed to use other companies' names in their own ads. Unfortunately, that didn't stop anyone. Once you start to become a market leader, others in the market will start trying to attract potential customers by using your name to attract you.
Another, more aggressive tactic can happen on selling platforms like Amazon and eBay: fake reviews. There's a dirty rib on Amazon that most customers don't know about; similarly, eBay's appeals process can get a little quirky at times.
Whether it's a competing seller selling your product or reporting you for selling children's toys as pornography, it can be a minefield. The more success you have, the bigger the goals you have on your back.
There is no foolproof advice for avoiding these strategies other than to keep an eye out for them. You need to set up a monitoring schedule for Google to check on other companies using your name, keep an eye on reviews, report anything suspicious and react quickly to unexpected seller closures that occur.