Optimizing SMB Marketing on a Bootstrapped Budget — Palmer Houchins // CallRail

Quotes

• “They are going to need the right marketing toolkit. It is some version of search, social and maybe even a marketing piece. Beyond that, you want to make sure that you’ve got a good analytics platform in place and depending on the business, the CRM component type.” -Palmer“Once you brought the pieces together, it’s about understanding how they tie in your business metrics and so you can put together benchmarks, KPIs that you will want to look to on day-to-day and month-to-month basis.” -Palmer“A lot of these varies on the business type but what I have seen as best practices across the board are really figuring out a perspective, a point of view that you are going to have on your emails.” -Palmer“I think when you build up that trust when you get that inbox that is regularly open to your emails, the ability to be really effective as a direct-response marketer just opens wide.” -Palmer“The segmentation part is really important. I think a lot of times we try to segment by customer lifetime value or what they have purchased in the past butI think that a lot of the major players now are giving you the ability to segment based on engagement levels.” -Palmer“Thinking about the right level of customer engagement is another factor that then branches to the automation discussion which is something, in the past five years, been democratized for the SMB marketplace. At this point, any SMBs can have the basic building blocks of good automation or transactional sequence right at their fingertips.” -Palmer“What you need to spend your time on, ifyou’re an SMB owner is making sure that when someone gets to one of your properties, you have all the hooks and triggers to build that relationship to the point where they love you and they are ready to buy.” -Ben “To me, the focus on the nurture campaign should be done in-house and a lot of the lead generation and acquisition of new leads can be outsourced or can be something that you focus on, down the road.” -Ben “I think, by and large, most SMBs that are going to be doing digital marketing would benefit from a CRM but there is a whole range of options out there in terms of how lightweight or heavy-duty you want to go.” -Palmer“I do think that there is a lot of benefit for SMBs in centralizing that information especially with digital marketing being at everyone’s fingertips now and really empowering businesses to do more.” -Palmer“I think it’s about right-sizing your stack as you get started. From an SMB standpoint, the most important thing is figuring out what do I need now, what do I need out of the gate, what do I want the software to do for me and being able to effectively measure that so that you are not suffering from having too many different tools that can overwhelm your time and probably your budget.” -Palmer