It's not enough to just launch a small business. For it to start making money, you need happy clients — lots of happy clients! Therefore, you can’t do without online marketing. But, unfortunately, marketing is not so simple. Because it requires resources that are in short supply. Read on to know what resources small businesses usually lack, what are the greatest challenges such businesses face, and what to do about it.
Table of Contents
A Digital Marketing Suite Is the Only Solution
Limited Staff
Most small businesses in the US, about 82%, are operated solely by their owners without any employees, according to Forbes. Only a small fraction, 16%, have a workforce ranging from 1 to 19 employees. Even fewer, just 650,003 small businesses, have a staff size between 20 and 499. Hence the simple conclusion: small businesses may not have enough staff to handle all the marketing tasks and activities, such as creating and distributing content, managing social media accounts, running email campaigns, analyzing data, etc. And in most cases, one person has to do tasks from different fields — writing, designing, coding, etc. Is it possible to achieve good results in such a situation? Of course, it isn't, that's a rhetorical question.
Also, The Right CRM Manager Makes All The Difference
Limited Knowledge
A small business owner just can't have enough knowledge in every field. And probably can't have enough expertise to use the latest and most effective marketing tools and strategies. SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media marketing, etc. — it takes you a lot of time to learn best practices and trends in digital marketing. Meanwhile, 35% of small business owners said that they spend more than 40 hours per week on their business, and 25% said that they spend more than 60 hours per week, writes NerdWallet. With such a heavy workload, how can one have enough time to learn digital marketing, and then plan, execute, monitor, and optimize marketing strategies?
And after all, don't forget about digital marketing software that can be tricky. You will need to spend some time getting the hang of it.
Limited Budgets
However, the problem of lack of staff and lack of knowledge is easy to solve if you have money. Money can generally solve many problems. But, unfortunately, this resource is also limited for small businesses. According to a survey by Constant Contact, 43% of small businesses said that their biggest challenge in 2022 was finding the money to market their business.
For example, if you want to hire a full-time marketing manager for your small business, you may have to pay an average salary of $96,253 per year, plus benefits and taxes. That's what Upwork says. Hiring a marketing agency for a long-term partnership may cost you about $6,000 per month. A freelance marketing consultant for a specific project or campaign may take from $15 to $45 per hour.
But — hold on a second! — just one marketer is not enough. Someone has to build a website for you, assemble chatbots, craft persuasive texts and valuable content for newsletters, and much more.
Staff is not the only cost item. You will need to purchase software and ads on various channels, to invest in marketing campaigns.
But how adopting an all-in-one digital marketing suite can solve all these issues?
A Digital Marketing Suite Is the Only Solution
A digital marketing suite is a set of all the necessary software tools for online marketing. There are applications for creating websites without having to write code, building chatbots, launching email marketing, and even a CRM system. All these applications are friends with each other, as they say, right out of the box.
The advantages of the suite are obvious: having received all the necessary tools, you are freed from the need to choose the right tools among thousands of marketing applications (not always compatible with each other). And because a digital marketing suite is made for small business owners (who, as we now know, don't have the time to understand the complexities of software and the money to hire powerful specialists), it's easy to use.
Lastly, thanks to a freemium price model, it's affordable.
For example, let's take our TruVISIBILITY Suite as an example. Here's what it includes:
- Chat — an application for creating chatbots of any complexity. You can build simple rule-based chatbots, hybrid AI-powered chatbots, and set up a live chat.
- Sites — a simple yet powerful website and landing page visual builder. You can use ready-made templates or make your website from scratch.
- Messaging — a tool for designing emails and launching email marketing campaigns
- Blogs — an SEO-friendly environment for publishing articles
- CRM — a software for tracking and optimizing every interaction and opportunity with every contact for pre- and post-sales activity.
Since it's designed to be user-friendly, you can learn how to use it in a couple of days and get along without a big team of specialists. The pricing model is just great — by getting a freemium TruVISIBILITY account, you'll have fully functional software and free monthly allotment. You can make a chatbot that can have 100 chats per month, send 1000 emails and text messages each month, and create a website with a blog free of cost. Plus, we offer 1 GB of storage, an SSL certificate for security, and unlimited use of our API.
As your business grows, you can increase the number of chats your bot can have, the emails and texts you send each month, the websites you create, and your storage space and thus control how much you have to pay monthly.
Conclusion
So, you have learned about the main problems of small business - you have to do everything yourself, while there is not enough expertise, and there is no money for a specialist. Fortunately, this can be solved. With the easy-to-use TruVISIBILITY Suite, you have at your disposal a complete set of tools that will help you establish your online presence without the help of expensive specialists.
Thanks to the freemium pricing model, you get basic functionality, which is more than enough at first, for free. As your business grows, and so does your income, you can adjust the amount of workload you do with our suite. Thus, you only pay for what you use without any contract. And so — save money!
— Wait, but how to do everything right? — you ask finally. The answer is simple: read our blog — and you will learn about digital marketing everything you need to sell like the Fortune 500 giants.
Related articles
Want to receive more articles?
Sign-up for our weekly newsletter to receive info that will help your business grow