Digital Marketing vs Social Media Marketing

What are the differences between Digital Marketing and Social Media Marketing?

Digital marketing is a broader term than social media marketing, referring to any marketing which uses digital tools. Digital marketing includes any use of social media.

Social media is a subset of digital marketing that focuses on building online communities around brands or products, usually through the acquisition and sharing of customer-generated content.

Five Ways in Which Digital Marketing Is Practically Undefinable

1. The digital space is an ever-changing place

2. Digital marketing is so big now that it’s practically undefinable

3. The future of digital marketing looks very different from the present

4. Digital Marketing offers more opportunities than ever before

5. There are many places to find success in digital marketing

Six Essential Steps to Optimizing Your Sales Process with Digital Marketing

In order to be successful, all companies need to have a good customer acquisition strategy. A key part of that strategy is understanding the customer lifetime value. If we know the customer’s lifetime value, we can set a realistic goal and plan on how much we want to spend for acquiring a new customer.

A personalized email campaign helps us stay in touch with our customers and reach out to them on a regular basis. It may be as simple as sending an email newsletter or as complex as sending personalized email messages that are triggered by their purchase behavior or some other action they take on our website.

With digital marketing, sales processes are made much more effective.

Digital marketing has made it possible to strengthen the sales process. With access to social media, prospects are able to find information about a brand with ease. This makes the likelihood of conversion much higher, as customers are confident in their purchase decision.

The first step in optimizing your sales process with digital marketing is to create a personalized email campaign. It requires you to find out which type of email will work best for different types of customers and tailor each message accordingly, preferably including an offer or incentive that would make them want to reply or click on it. The next step is determining what services are most relevant for each individual customer so that you know what are your customers needs.

The Five Categories of Digital Marketing Tools Every Business Needs to Have in Place

Digital marketing is the use of internet-based channels to reach out to target customers or prospects. The benefits are that you get access to customers who may not be aware of your product or service.

Most businesses need these six types of tools in order to get results:

– Web Analytics Tool

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that provides insights into a website’s performance and how it is being used. It provides information on the number of active users, how they are using the site, and more.

It can show you which part of your website is most popular among your visitors, the average time spent on your site, what pages are being visited most often, and what devices people are using to access your website.

– Content Management Tool

The content management tool is software that is used to create, organize, and publish content on the internet.

WordPress is the most popular content management tool. Drupal is also a content management tool that is similarly popular with designers and developers.

– CRM Tools

CRM Tools are a set of technologies that help track and manage customer relationships from the perspective of a business. CRM Tools can provide insight into customer behavior, predict future actions based on past behavior, and identify potential risks.

The CRM market is dominated by Salesforce, which holds a 70% market share in this space. However, new players like Oracle and Hubspot are also competing for business with their own CRM products.

– Landing Page Builder Tool

Dominate your competitors with high-converting landing pages that are professionally designed, easy to edit, and fast to create.

The Landing Page Builder Tool enables marketers to create better landing pages faster. It gives you the power to design beautiful landing pages without any coding skills so you can spend more time testing and optimizing your campaigns.

– Social Media Management Tools

Social media management tools help digital marketers and agencies monitor their social media accounts and pages on a single dashboard. They also make sure that the content on the pages is up to date and relevant for the target audience.

Some of the popular platforms for social media management are Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, and BuzzSumo.

How Does Social Media Affect the Performance of a Brand?

Social media is often referred to as the “Wild West” of marketing. It’s important to understand the differences between organic and paid social media promotion, and why they can affect a brand’s performance.

When it comes to branding, the primary focus is on creating a positive impression of a company or product in the minds of consumers. Social media has become an integral part of branding because it allows for interaction and engagement with potential customers.

Social media can be used for organic or paid promotion. Organic promotion happens through unpaid posts that promote your company or product without any compensation while paid promotion means you pay to promote posts about your company or product through Facebook ads, Twitter ads, etc. Organic posts are typically seen as more trustworthy than paid posts because people find it more credible when you interact with them

The Benefits of Social Media Marketing in the Age of Digital Marketing

Social media marketing is a type of internet marketing that utilizes social networking websites, blogs, and other social media platforms to share content with a wide audience. When used in effective marketing strategies, social media has the potential to reach an enormous global audience.

The benefits of social media marketing include:

– Reach

– Cost

– Engagement

– Personalization

– Results in less time

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is a way to promote brands, products, services, or public figures/entities. It uses social networking platforms to do so.

There are many benefits of social media marketing. The most obvious one is that it’s free! You don’t have to pay for advertisements on these platforms since they are already free.

Another benefit is the ability to reach your target audience wherever they are – it doesn’t matter whether they are at home or in an office, at school or out shopping, at the park or the gym- you can connect with them through social media channels.

Furthermore, studies show that people who use Facebook and Twitter every day spend more money online than those who don’t. So not only can you reach your audience easily but also encourage

How to Use Social Media for Your Business

You can use social media for business by posting about your products or services on these platforms to reach potential customers.

You may also want to use social media for customer service purposes. For example, if you are selling a product that is defective, you should ask the customer to contact you so that you can solve their problem. There are many other uses of social media for business, which makes it a crucial marketing tool in 2021.

Social media is another important channel to connect with customers, whether they are current or potential ones.

People use social media for many reasons, and because you’re trying to market your business to them, it’s important that you use it wisely.

Digital Marketing vs Social Media Marketing and How They Work Together

Digital marketing is the overarching term for the strategies and tactics that use digital and online channels to promote a product or service. Social media marketing is one form of digital marketing, but it’s not the only form.

Digital marketing includes advertising, social media, SEO, content creation, and more whereas social media marketing includes Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Pinterest Ads etc.

Social Media Marketing depends on digital marketing but it also has its own methods of attracting customers such as testimonials through video or pictures and building a following through posting interesting content to engage with the audience.

What does a Digital Marketer do?

Digital marketing professionals, also known as ‘marketers’, are in charge of implementing digital marketing campaigns with the aim of boosting sales and increasing brand awareness.

Digital marketers are responsible for the management of all digital marketing activities across various channels like Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads and SEO. Their duties include:

– Managing website traffic by optimizing landing pages and conversion rates

– Getting more followers on social media platforms like Facebook

– Creating blog posts that will go viral on social media sites like Reddit

– Creating compelling content that will be shared on social media platforms like LinkedIn

– Designing emails for email blasts to connect with their audience

What does a Social Media Manager do?

A social media manager oversees the social media presence of a company or organization. The digital marketing skillset is in high demand, so companies are hiring social media managers at an increasing rate.

A social media manager usually manages the following for their employers:

-Social Media Strategy: A plan that outlines their goals and objectives, content typology, frequency, timing, and volume.

-Content Development: Developing content that is engaging to followers and potential clients on a consistent basis. Posting this content to various platforms on a scheduled basis while also tracking analytics data for each post’s performance

-Community Management: Responding to customer service issues via social media platforms and monitoring customer feedback across a variety of channels.

-Monitoring the Competition: Checking the competitive landscape.

How can Digital Marketing & Social Media Marketing work together for your Business?

Digital marketing is a subset of the wider marketing concept. Digital Marketing includes both traditional marketing and new media.

In the internet age, the digital promotion has become an integral part of all businesses that rely on customer acquisition for survival.

Digital marketing is an inevitable part of any business. With the rise of social media networks, new opportunities are opening up for digital marketers.

The Internet has made it possible to reach people across the world with just a few clicks of a button. The internet has also made the global competition more challenging than ever before.

Choose the Digital Marketing Strategy that Works Best for Your Business

Choosing the right digital marketing strategy for your business is an important decision. It is not just about what you are trying to achieve, but it is also about what you are trying to avoid.

A lot of businesses go with content marketing because they want to get better search engine rankings and drive more traffic to their site. However, this strategy comes with its own unique challenges that some businesses may not be able to handle.

Advertising on digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter can be an effective way of getting more visitors to your website, but it can also turn off some people who don’t want all their personal information collected by companies.

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

Marketing Myths

The Digital Marketing revolution began when Archie Query Form led the world into technological advancement. In 1993, the first banner ad welcomed the possibility of advertising online. While the rest is history, the Internet started to explode with myths about Digital Marketing. We’re excited to put some myths to rest- Forever!!

#Digital Marketing Myth01: Starters’ Pack for a Start-up: An Enthusiastic Friend, A Coffee Shop, And A Website Marketing

You need to have an enthusiastic friend who cries over every little inconvenience their office gives and can’t wait to start their own business. Then, a perfect barista place where you can lay out the business plan on some tissue paper.

Lastly, a website.

Many entrepreneurs believe that a website is enough to get you through the breakpoint and later make some profits. However, a site is not everything about digital.

Along with a responsive and creatively put together website, you need to have:

●   Social Media Accounts

●   Creative Ads

●   Branding Strategy

●   Lead Generation Campaigns

●   Traffic is driven via SEO and much more

#Digital Marketing Myth02: SEO is FINALLY Dead

“SEO is dead” has been an eternal phrase now. Some experts are preying on ending the era of SEO.

We do agree that SEO practices from the year 2010 won’t come in handy now. But you have to find a way to learn and execute what’s trending.

For the updated SEO practices:

●   Purpose your content for your audience first

●   Focus on topics more than keywords

●   Create the best quality of backlinks

●   Make sure the site is technically optimized

●   Utilize local listings, local keyword targeting, and local SEO content strategy

●   Optimize your website for voice search

●   Use keywords in the permalink; make it clean

For the fact- SEO services are well blooming and serving the purpose.

#Digital Marketing Myth03: Once Upon a Time, I SEO-ed.

There’s still a percentage of businesses that pay heed to SEO. But they think it to be a one-day game. If you are worried to improve your Alexa rankings and can’t wait to see your site on #1 SERPs for the targeted keywords, then you’ve to work tirelessly.

Tip for You: Create a strategy for a quarter, assign a budget and execute the plan. Note the results. Make improvements and utilize the same for the next quarter.

However, do strategize a new plan whenever you come across an update as SEO algorithms change now and then.

#Digital Marketing Myth04: Social for People Not for Businesses as digitalmarketer

Social media gained a repo to “bring people together”. Brands are now also utilizing it to connect with their end customer. But do you think B2B companies don’t have anything to do with it?

As the platforms sprouted, classification followed. You need to discern the use of every platform and identify the kind of audience available on each.

How to put social media to use for a business?

●   Find out the right platform for your business

• Define your audience
• Set your goal
• Find where your audience is

●   Find the ground (platform) where your competitors are playing (performing) well

●   Customize content & creative strategy for different social media channels

You need to involve your end customers with your brand even if they are not your direct customers. Especially for B2B companies. Your potential prospects will gain more trust through your profile if they understand your dynamics with the audience.

#Digital Marketing Myth05: Oh no! It’s bad that they cribbed about me.

Negative comments online? Scariest notification for any brand. But are all negative comments bad for your company’s reputation?

We tend to differ from the popular opinion that negative comments bring unnecessary backlash from the customers. We think you can use this as an opportunity to create awareness. What else you can do with negative comments?

●   Confide your customers in you by responding to their worries

●   Gain brand authenticity by staying real

●   Showcase your problem-solving skills

●   Stay prompt and connect with your customer base (Quick Customer Servicing gets you extra points)

As it’s said, “Bad publicity is good publicity.” (Wink!)

#Digital Marketing Myth06: Perfect to the T when it’s about Creativity

The author of Procrasdemon – The Artist’s Guide to Liberation From Procrastination, Neeraj Agnihotri puts it in the best way possible, “The desire for perfection often leads to the awakening of the Procrasdemon. Allowing yourself to make mistakes is the single most effective way to get rid of it.”

In digital space, you want to create havoc with something extra-ordinary, unheard of, and unseen for sure. But don’t waste your time until that happens.

You’ve to keep making your move every day till the time comes when your creativity is praised by the masses.

Though aim for perfection, don’t get bogged down by disappointment. Every piece of the word, image, and video is nothing but a few bytes. They’re in today, out tomorrow. Post it; get over it.

#Digital Marketing Myth07: SEM for Branding Marketing? What?

SEM is done with an intention, purpose, and goal. Whereas, branding is an organic process to gain the likes of your audience. There seems to be no bridge between the two for many business owners.

But here’s how you can use SEM for branding:

●   Keep your competitors away from #1 Rank on SERPs by bidding on the targeted keywords

●   Dedicate a budget for brand awareness

●   Users searching for your (type of) products show potential to get converted; so be there on the top for them

#Digital Marketing Myth08: Retargeting Marketing  is so wannabe

You need to put your ego away when it comes to retarget. It’s not like you’ve been rejected by your crush.

Show consistency and meet their expectations the next time you lure them to your site. The retargeted audience is indeed the most potential customer for you. 89% of users have a positive or neutral reaction towards retargeting; so it’s not a wannabe act.

Here’s the quick guide to do it right:

●   Create urgency using copies that push the intend

●   Introduce ‘exclusive’, ‘prestigious’ or ‘just for you’ offer for upselling and cross-selling customers who ended up buying from you previously

●   Rotate a set of 3-5 ads keeping the conversion as your goal so that your audience doesn’t get bored

We Gotcha Ya’!

When you think digital, think of opportunities. Let us know if we helped you to debunk some of the common myths. As Andy Warhol said, “They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”

So, let’s get on to the task of doing digital marketing with absoluteness. For assistance, we’re the best creative digital agency to contact, anytime!

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more, click here to check out the book now. 

Grow Your Business Fast—And Still Have Fun!

Of all the challenges entrepreneurs face, scaling their business is one of the hardest, and the marketing department often bears the brunt when they are asked to meet rising expectations and demand without an increase in budget. How do marketers do more with less—without compromising on quality?

The answer lies in becoming a scaleur—combining entrepreneurial ingenuity with marketing skill and panache. Think Big, Scale Fast draws on lessons from major global conglomerates and tenacious startups to provide a comprehensive, practical guide for entrepreneur of all stripes.

You’ll learn how to:

• Cultivate the right mindset to handle the challenges of growth and uncertainty.
• Fine-tune strategy and processes before scaling.
• Assemble the right team on a limited budget.
• Leverage the power of repurposed content and automation tools.
• And more!As a company grows, many owners see their entrepreneurial dream fade into a nightmare as their business becomes just another all-consuming job, but a scaleur knows how to scale successfully while still enjoying the ride.

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more, click here to check out the book now. 

A lot has changed in the past year. The global pandemic has upended entire industries and many businesses have scrambled to pivot to accommodate massive losses, massive growth, or just massive changes. Fortunately, the Scaleur practices that we cover in this blog can help entrepreneurs and businesses weather storms like these far better than their competition. 

That’s why we think it’s the perfect time to revisit the fundamentals: The 4 S’s of Scaling. 

To truly scale, you must upsize your strategic practices, implement new marketing strategies, find new ways to build your team and expand your mindset to break through whatever is keeping you stuck at the same level. Then you must be willing to take the leap into the giant unknown. After 2020, piece of cake, right? 

1. STRATEGY

The first “S,” strategy, helps you to set firm foundations and know who your target is and how to go after them. It will also help you identify the exact steps to follow every time in order to acquire customers.

Customer first

Dive in and try to understand who your customer is (and is not). Get away from your desk, and talk to your prospects and customers to find out: 

• Who are they?
• Why are they buying your product? Or not buying it?
• How much is your product worth to them?
• How much is your product saving them?

Think like a scaleur

As an entrepreneur, you are on the mission to create predictable growth. Talk to smart and like-minded people and be the one who has a growth scaleur mindset.

This will impact not only sales, but attract the right people, reduce stress and decision making, create a culture, and help you be nimble and flexible. Put these people on your website. Make sure your team knows them, and make sure you follow them and interact with them online. Ultimately, know what you stand for before you try to scale.

Make your marketing playbook or roadmap

Your playbook and roadmap are essential for your business. You’ll need these to win new business/ leads. It’s never too early to start constructing your playbook.

2. SYSTEMS

Once you have the stages and steps defined, you can build a system around it to facilitate, monitor, and optimize your process. Find out what marketing automation tools work.

Define your values 

Every company needs a clear set of values. Talk to people around you. Go to networking functions and never eat lunch alone to find like-minded scaleurs; pick their brains about what processes work. Use this to refine your marketing playbook or roadmap!

Set up mass emailing

Short and sweet email templates work for a top-down based approach. It helps you find the right person, which is a crucial part of the process. Don’t ask for the sale, ask for the person – can you direct me to the person on your team responsible for…? Be human, not sales-y. 

3. SCALEUR

If you have the right foundation, system, processes, and roadmap established, it makes it easier to hire the right people who can execute for you.

Optimize the ‘free trial’ of your product

A free trial is a great way to let your product sell itself and lower your sales costs. If you’re going to do this, think of the steps that a customer takes to get to the ‘wow’ moment as a funnel.

Team

A core group of fun, creative, hardworking, and intelligent people / scaleurs is your number one priority. If you get this part right, everything else gets a lot easier.

Hire the right kind of scaleurs in terms of personality types and culture fit. That means coachability, adaptability, curiosity, and a strong work ethic, having that scaleur growth mindset.

Make sure you hire scaleurs and people who like to get their hands dirty. It’s all about the hustle.

When hiring, the best predictor of future success is past performance. Your hiring process starts by clearly describing what skills are critical to succeeding. Important questions to ask:

• Describe how you rank your leads?
• How did you build a pipeline?
• Describe your email strategy?
• How do you use social media to connect with your prospects? 
• What KPIs did you use to manage your activity?

4. SUCCESS PANEL

Once you have everything in place. You need to ensure consistent results by looking at the numbers and determining what’s working. Review every step of the marketing funnel to determine where the holes are.

Analyze your funnel

Analyze your marketing funnel with three metrics:

• Flow: break your marketing funnel down into it primary units. Monitor how many people are moving through each step in the funnel
• Conversion: measure things like free trials, conversion rate, deal closed in a time-series graph. Ask how you can improve each step.
• Profitability, or customer acquisition cost (CAC). What is your cost of acquiring a customer?

Focus

Don’t go crazy trying to track everything. Figure out your best metrics by observing what led your best customer to purchase. A sales demo? An email? A free download? A visit to your website? Focus on the right metrics.

Product-market fit 

Analyze the product-market fit. It’s a waste of money to have people selling a bad product. Fix your product problems first.

Your metrics will likely change over time. What indicates success at one time may mean something entirely different at another. Be committed to being responsive as you get new information.

Looking Forward

If you can apply the 4 S’s of Scaling: Strategy, Systems, Scaleur, and Success Panel, your business will be more prepared than most to not only weather any unexpected chaos that comes your way but will be set up to thrive. So get started today and make 2021 your best business year yet! 

Keep a Scaleur’s Mindset

Moreover, never forget that the starting point for scaling lies not in your capital, resources, infrastructure, clientele, or workforce, but within you: the scaleur’s mindset. That means having the energy and desire to scale, and possessing a “growth mindset” that embraces change and uncertainty, thrives on challenges, and learns from failures. 

If you’ve cultivated the right mentality for scaling, you are ready to ascertain whether your existing processes can be scaled. Existing processes will be under heavy strain as your output increases exponentially — can you align and standardize them to accommodate an explosive period of growth? 

Invest in your Team

In almost all cases, scaling will require automation, which is largely a function of the right tools and technology. But processes also depend on people — and scaling, as with almost any function in business, demands that you have the right team in place. In a broad sense, this means having a team that lives and breathes the company values and gels with the company culture. You need the right mix of generalists and specialists to cover all the bases. Areas that in-house staff can’t cover must be filled in by outside help (freelancers, contract labor, outsourcing, etc.), or you’re going to have a rocky time with managing a corporate growth spurt.

Remember the nine core marketing positions that comprise your “A-team.” In smaller organizations, the same people may play more than one role, but fulfilling all of them is a key step toward successful scaling.

Stay Different 

Meanwhile, you must emphasize your differentiators as a company. Scaling is not achieved from wishful thinking or sheer will — if you wish to scale up, you must have something original, compelling, and marketable to entice a vastly expanded clientele. A differentiator, you may recall, fulfills three criteria: It must be true; it must be valuable to potential clients; and it must be provable.

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about Scaling Your Business, click here to check out the book now. 

It’s fundamental to have a clear plan when scaling your business. Unmanaged growth can cause critical problems that are painful and costly to fix. So defining a clear strategy, then sticking to it (and adjusting as necessary) is key. But how to do so? Our previous blog posts will certainly set you on the right path and give you more than enough tools to set you up for success. 

But there’s another element that, as an entrepreneur, you cannot skip: mindset. These five key ideas for scaling your business below are crucial parts of an entrepreneurial mindset. More than any tools or practices, maintaining these five mindsets below and putting them to regular use will set you up for success. 

1. ABL: Always be learning

Great marketers and great marketing teams never stop learning. They’re always learning about the latest best practices, technological developments, and market and industry developments. They embrace curiosity as part of their work and driving force. Of course, there’s a quantitative side to marketing, but the magic that makes great marketing great comes from the qualitative side, the creativity that must be fed by a curious team. 

2. Be determined, work hard

To succeed you need to have the ability to go through walls to get to your dreams. Being more determined than 95% of everyone else is not a nice-to-have, but required to succeed at scaling. The journey is much harder than a laptop on a beach on Instagram. It requires long hours, tough decisions, risk, and instability. But fear not, stick with it and you’ll be rewarded! 

3. Check your ego at the door

Don’t conflate determination with ego or cockiness. There are plenty of people out there who know more than you or are more skilled than you. Learn to ask for help and turn your network and open-mindedness into an asset. Look at things this way: There are no failures, just learning opportunities. 

4. Be open

Adopt a collaborative mindset. Like above, it actually helps to be open and vulnerable. True confidence is not being afraid to be open and to share your knowledge and experience with others. Ask for advice and be willing to give advice. Do this as part of your constant practice of striving to be better. 

5. Culture is everything

Don’t just embody the above qualities yourself but within your team, too. Encourage your team members to always be curious, to be hardworking, to be collaborative, and to be helpful. Building a team with these qualities will set you and your business up for success more than anything else. 

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about how to scale business, click here to check out the book now. 

Scaling isn’t about unbridled growth with no direction. At some point, you might have to slow growth and scale down due to market or demand fluctuations or scale business even more to meet unexpected growth. This could be a result of natural peaks and troughs in your business cycle or a consequence of a recession. Even a fundamental change in your industry that is beyond your control. Either way, lots of factors can make or break a business, so it’s important to be ready for whatever comes your way. 

Scalability is about knowing when to change course and having the resources to do so. If you don’t prepare to scale, then you can pretty much prepare to fail. Failures will inevitably occur as you scale.

The secret ingredient that keeps “failures” from turning into “disasters” is the capacity to use mistakes to your advantage. Learning from them and adapting — the old saw about “failing forward.”

Be Prepared with Reserves

When your business is thriving and growing rapidly, ensure you have provisions to meet new demands. This might mean having access to a greater volume of products or increasing staffing levels quickly to deliver a service. It may also mean having a cash flow that is sustainable and funds that can be moved about quickly. If there is a downturn or a sudden fall in demand, do you have a plan in place to cut costs and streamline the business so it can still run efficiently under pressure?

Watch the Market

Ultimately, your business plan should take into consideration the changes that put pressure on scalability. This should be the key driver of your plan. If there is a limit to the production you can churn out, there is little point in executing a marketing strategy that is going to give you more sales than you can handle. Success is about finding the right balance to ensure your business can adjust to the ups and the downs, and knowing when to take your foot off the gas or ease up to comfortably meet changing demands.

Keep up with the changing world. Change is happening faster and faster. The only way to thrive is to accept the inevitability of change. Move faster than your competition and race to the future. Build that business, instead of just creating a job.

Keep a Scaleur’s Mindset

Moreover, never forget that the starting point for scaling lies not in your capital, resources, infrastructure, clientele, or workforce, but within you: the scaleur’s mindset. That means having the energy and desire to scale business, and possessing a “growth mindset” that embraces change and uncertainty, thrives on challenges, and learns from failures. 

If you’ve cultivated the right mentality for scaling, you are ready to ascertain whether your existing processes can be scaled.

Existing processes will be under heavy strain as your output increases exponentially — can you align and standardize them to accommodate an explosive period of growth? 

Invest in your Team

In almost all cases, scaling will require automation, which is largely a function of the right tools and technology. But processes also depend on people — and scaling, as with almost any function in business, demands that you have the right team in place. In a broad sense, this means having a team that lives and breathes the company values and gels with the company culture. You need the right mix of generalists and specialists to cover all the bases. Areas that in-house staff can’t cover must be filled in by outside help (freelancers, contract labor, outsourcing, etc.), or you’re going to have a rocky time with managing a corporate growth spurt.

Remember the nine core marketing positions that comprise your “A-team.” In smaller organizations, the same people may play more than one role, but fulfilling all of them is a key step toward successful scaling.

Stay Different 

Meanwhile, you must emphasize your differentiators as a company. Scaling is not achieved from wishful thinking or sheer will — if you wish to scale business up, you must have something original, compelling, and marketable to entice a vastly expanded clientele.

A differentiator, you may recall, fulfills three criteria: It must be true; it must be valuable to potential clients, and it must be provable.

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped!

Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about How to Scale the RIght Way, click here to check out the book now. 

If your business is ready to accommodate growth through scaling it is much more likely to survive. It will have the durability, flexibility, and longevity, to stay the course for success. Consistent growth that meets and then exceeds KPIs is the goal. Revenues going up and to the right, an inspired team, happy customers, and a clear plan. What could be better? But while scaling is obviously the goal, it’s important you do scale the right way. 

No matter what kind of business you’re in today, it’s always changing and evolving. This is especially true for digitally-oriented enterprises. The business you’re operating today will go through major changes as it scales and this process will involve a lot of trial and error. Ultimately, there are no shortcuts, just focus, determination, flexibility, and creativity. Embrace what works for you and your business and let go of what doesn’t. Be prepared to throw out bad ideas completely and expand upon good ideas. 

A scaling business has numerous benefits: 

•  Improved efficiency.

  Scalable businesses are more efficient because they plan for all eventualities and ensure they can operate in different circumstances.

• Consistency.

  Businesses that scale effectively are better at delivering expected results reliably, no matter what problems emerge.

• Adaptability.

  Maintaining the flexibility to adapt to economic changes and pressures means knowing when to up-scale or down-scale as required.

• Longevity.

  Businesses that carefully consider scalability are much more likely to survive far into the future.

• Competition.

  It should go without saying that if you have a scalable business and are successful as a result, you are a strong competitor in your field.

For businesses, the path to success is not in simply growing but in scaling your business. To effectively scale your marketing in particular and your business in general, you must be achieving exponential growth while keeping your costs fairly low. But truth be told, scaling a marketing business requires a whole new level of skills and systems that many entrepreneurs can’t fully anticipate. 

As you begin scaling your marketing and your business, you may find yourself experiencing increased expenses, customer support issues, and miscommunication between staff members. An existing bad process will only be amplified once you begin trying to scale. 

So what can you do about these challenges that crop up? Maintain equanimity, fortitude, and open-mindedness. Remember, this is fun! Enjoy the ride and try to do the best by your team and customers. 

Become a Successful Scaleur and learn how to scale

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about How to Sustainably Scale A Business, click here to check out the book now. 

Ambition and drive are fundamental to success when scaling a business. But you also need a clear plan for growth. When growth isn’t managed or structured, it won’t last long or be sustainable, and you won’t reach all your goals. In fact, the clearer you are with your scaling objectives, the more successful you will be to scale a business. 

In my experience scaling my own and clients’ businesses, there are four techniques you can apply for maximum success. These four techniques are called the 4 S’s of Scaling. So use these time-tested techniques below to keep your business moving along. Even when you’re in over your head or just need to get clarity as you chart your path forward. 

And if you need some extra help, check out our FunnelIQ tool. It might be just what you need to scale a business!  

The 4 S’s to Scale a Business

Strategy

Make an annual timeline. It’s vital to have a roadmap for where you want to go, and when you want to arrive. Your annual plan can include how many clients or customers you want to have by the end of the year. As well as what kind of time commitment is required once there are 10, 20, or more. Your timeline should also include your goals for partners, employees, and sales funnels. The more you plan for, the better your chance of success.

Scoring Tool

Monitor your timeline. Once you have a plan in place, you should implement some kind of system to keep track of your progress. And how much time you spend on each client. If you can’t meet your timeline, or you get an influx of new clients all of a sudden. You have to figure out how to change your plan so you can still do a good job. This may require you to temporarily pay an agency to help you until you put a better system in place. The dashboard of scaleurs.com will also help you to define and track your timeline. Think about where you are now vs. where you want to go and why. Use that to define a SMART KPI, and that KPI is what you will track in your team or executive dashboard from Scaleurs. 

Scaleur Mindset

Be open to change and scaling up. Make sure you don’t have too much on your plate. If someone on your team feels overwhelmed, you have no choice but to help them. If you feel overwhelmed, you need a way to step back and assess so you can cope. Building a cohesive team means that everybody gets involved, and everyone owns a certain part of a project, so be proactive by asking your team how they’re doing and advocating for your people by seeing who can help pitch in to assist them. If there’s too much on your employee’s plate, you can hire outside help, ask someone else to contribute, or just do it yourself. Hiring outside help and asking others to step up can take some of the load off you.

Find people to outsource tasks to. It can be tempting to want to do everything yourself, but you don’t have enough time, energy, or know-how to do all that’s required to run your company. Know when it’s time to outsource, delegate, and get things off your plate. Rather than waste time on bolstering your weaknesses, focus your efforts on your strengths and the big picture of growing your company.

Find strategic partners; they make life easier for you, whether they provide you with data, exchange clients with you, or refer clients to your company. Say you don’t make websites, but your strategic partner does. You’d include them on projects that require building a site for your client (or even on improving your own site), and they’d refer clients to you — it’s a win-win. Mutually beneficial relationships help grow your business and allow you to focus more of your time on your core competency.

Build a deliberate environment. There’s a balance between making sure that your employees are happy and performing at a high level. A big part of building company morale is making sure every choice you make — whether it’s vacation policy, chain of command issues, or workflow processes — is clearly communicated and well-understood. Being a team member is a job in and of itself, so share in the stress and in the reward.

Systems

Have the right systems and processes in place. Remember, it’s more important to deliver on time than to pull in more clients. Most startups fail because of bad management. When you have lots of clients, you have to prioritize. Your first step is to deliver high-quality work on time, which is more important than landing additional leads or clients, so devise a plan for scaling in a smart, effective way. Make a budget, come up with a forecast, and prepare for how you’re going to grow while also maintaining quality.

Good communication solves almost any problem. As a marketing leader, the ability to communicate with your employees and your partners about an upcoming uptick in workload will help address anyone’s feelings of being overwhelmed. If your team feels inundated with work, you have to motivate them and offer to help or outsource tasks.

Don’t be afraid to move on. Some companies spend a huge amount of time and money on trying to please difficult clients. But there are millions of companies in the U.S. alone to work with, so there’s no need for your business to stand or fall on one client, or waste energy and resources on ones that are unpleasant, overly demanding, slow in paying, or otherwise problematic. If the terms aren’t working for you, negotiate them or drop the client.

Remember, failing to plan is planning to fail. If you scale a business smartly, you can deliver the best work to your clients while also growing as a company by scaling.

Remember to Enjoy the Ride and Have Fun

The arduous process of scaling might seem like it can’t be fun, and there is a common notion that scaleurs are fun-averse workaholics who spend all their time building their brands and scaling up their businesses or marketing efforts, but smart scaleurs understand that time should be set aside for fun and recreation. It should not be about work all the time. 

I have been a scaleur for quite a while, and I have had to learn from other smart scaleurs that work should not be the sole focus of your days. As a matter of fact, one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, Richard Branson, has said, “If you are spending most of your life at work, it should not be a chore, and it should be fun!”

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

Be the black sheep

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about Marketing Strengths and Differentiators, click here to check out the book now. 

Many entrepreneurs attempt to define their competitive advantage, their secret sauce. What makes them different from the jump when they are just at the beginning of their business journey. In reality, most entrepreneurs misidentify this and through trial and error and meeting and learning from challenges. Along the way are able to more accurately define what differentiates them from the competition. 

Reflection can keep us motivated and help us push for our dreams. It’s good to have high self-esteem, but we also must be realistic in what we want to achieve. For example, at some point, a marketer — whether the owner of a business that provides marketing services or a member of the marketing department of another type of business — will figure out that they are better at providing after-sales email services rather than general content writing. That marketer will then focus on maintaining staff and specializing in the tools needed to provide after-sales email services instead of writing generic content. That can provide the reality check that strengthens the business in general and its marketing process in particular.

Just like focusing on one main goal can help you increase your results. Understanding what your marketing Strengths and differentiators are can be transformative for your business. Use the information below to help you more accurately identify your top two or three differentiators. The factors that make your business unique, so you can use them to stand out in a sea of competitors. Competitive differentiation is a process that helps buyers distinguish your firm from similar ones. And gives them a compelling reason to select you.

Find your differentiators

You don’t have to be radically different from your competitors (although if you are, so much the better). Rather, you need to find something about your business that you can own and make a distinctive part of your brand. To engage with your clientele, you have to provide and promote differentiators that they care about. 

There are multiple ways to find out what your customers really think to find your differentiators and where your customers think you stand out.

1. Create a short survey.

   The areas you want to focus on are improving the customer experience, product and service satisfaction, and what inspires customers to come back and refer friends. As you craft 10 to 12 short questions, keep in mind that they should lead to answers you can’t easily get in person or online.

2. Analyze your marketing results.

   Customers leave behind digital breadcrumbs that offer insights into what they want. In email, look at your open and click-through rates to see which content strikes a chord and what’s falling flat. Most of the popular social media networks offer free insights into performance, so take advantage of Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, and other such tools to see how you’re doing.

3. Ask customers how you’re doing.

   When customers are at the cash register or come to your website on a regular basis, don’t be afraid to ask for feedback. When you do, be explicit by letting them know that you’re looking to grow your business and would love their honest feedback about what you can do to improve their experience and keep them coming back to your company.

4. Get internal feedback.

   A lot of knowledge is in the brains of your colleagues. Ask them questions and challenge them to help you make your marketing better.

True differentiation takes place in the mind

It happens when a person connects your firm with an idea; when they think to themselves, “Ah! [Your company name here] — they’re the firm that’s known for ________.” If your prospects fill in the blank with something that’s both relevant to their businesses and not associated with your competitors, then you have created a powerful competitive differentiator.

Armed with this information, you’re ready to put a plan in place that not only scales your marketing strengths, but also scales your business. Since repetition is the key to remembering, reiterate your main differentiators in your social media profiles, website, and newsletters.

A matrix can help you determine your differentiators. In the columns, list your competitors; in the rows, enumerate the differentiators. Here are ways that businesses find their strengths and turn them into differentiators. Consider these three categories and how you might be different from the competition within these parameters: 

1. Focus.

   Maybe your company has a global foodservice operator data set. Lots of competitors have a global database (not dedicated to foodservice) or foodservice data for certain regions.

2. Simplicity.

   Your competitors might have elaborate, fancy websites, but some are hard to navigate, and it can be difficult to understand what they offer. Keep it simple and logical — this makes it easy to convert leads. Use only one call to action on the landing page instead of 10.

3. Scalability.

   Maintain a focus on the things that can be scaled up by providing access to a monthly data set such as recurring revenues.

Use the above to help you more accurately define your marketing strengths and differentiators. Once they’re clear to you, lean into them and leverage them to make your business stand out from the pack. There is a lot of competition and noise out there but not many people say something truly different and interesting. So go ahead, be different! 

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time! 

Marketing Scaleurs Founder Jolien Demeyer with Sales Scaleur Founder Shima Zeroual

Today’s marketing and sales landscape look vastly different from that of just a few decades ago. With the advent of the internet, blogging, social media, and a myriad of digital communications channels. The path to purchase is not a simple straight line. But a complex and varied web of twists and turns — and touchpoints.

Fundamentally, sales and marketing have always been intrinsically linked. Simply put, if marketing brings in inbound leads, sales need to chase them. But through the modern complex web of channels, Sales and Marketing have never been more closely connected than today. 

So what is that connection? How do both sides work together to create an efficient, well-oiled machine of a sales funnel? That’s what we’ll explore below. 

What’s the difference between Sales and Marketing? 

But let’s back up and first define the difference between sales and marketing. Before looking at the flow from one to the other. So clearly stated, what is the difference between sales and marketing? 

Marketing does the educating and advertising, attracting new leads with relevant information to get them interested in your offering. Sales close the deal, reminding the prospect of the value of your offerings. And helping them follow through with the purchase, converting the lead into a customer. 

Often sales manage relationships with customers or clients. And marketing manages the processes that make people interested in becoming a customer or client. 

The Setup

Today’s consumers are also increasingly immune to traditional advertising and sales methodologies. Meaning they conduct more independent research and take more convincing before they’re sold on making a purchase. 

That’s why the buyer’s journey may differ from one consumer to the next: They’re not all listening to the same radio spots to learn about your company. They’re not even being exposed to the same information about your brand from the same sources. Some may have discovered your company on the web, while others learned of your products or services through word-of-mouth recommendations. Some may read online reviews before engaging with your marketing team or filling out an online request for more information. Others will visit your website, read your blog, and evaluate your competition before engaging with your company.

What’s more, when leads are passed from marketing to sales, they’re expected to be “sales-ready,”. Or at the decision-making stage in the buying journey. The myriad paths to purchase makes it increasingly challenging to qualify leads effectively as sales-ready. 

It takes 18 touches on average to generate a viable sales lead. That means it takes multiple touches for a consumer to make the choice to request information. And even more to gather the information to determine whether a lead is ready to be passed to sales. 

At the early stages in the buyer’s journey. Consumers are often merely gathering information and building awareness about your products and services. Often, these interactions are not in-depth enough to provide the information necessary to qualify as leads. 

The Handoff 

Often in marketing we talk about the sales funnel, which, confusingly enough, is actually the marketing funnel. All the touchpoints described above – digital marketing activities like email, SEO, and social media – help to introduce or move the lead through the funnel to the point of making a decision. 

But once a lead is qualified, it’s important that the handoff from marketing to sales is coordinated and smooth. From here, it’s up to the sales team to to close the sale, and often, to maintain the customer relationship. 

A lot of this stage of the sales process can be automated with various tools, but ultimately it is still a personal process. A personal call to check in with a customer can still work wonders, and this is the job of the sales team. 

What to Consider

Scaling your business obviously assumes you will get more in-bound leads, which leads to more calls, which can lead to more sales. Do you have the structure in place to generate more leads and sales from end to end? 

Ask yourself, do you have: 

1. A sufficient lead flow to generate the desired number of leads?
2. Marketing systems to track and manage leads?
3. Enough sales representatives to follow up and close leads?
4. A robust system to manage sales orders?
5. A billing system and receivables function for follow-up to ensure invoices are collected on a timely basis?

When you’re tracking the right things, growth becomes much easier. Focus on metrics that make you a customer-centric organization, so you get actionable data and timely user feedback that pushes your company forward. Find out which marketing initiatives are creating value by improving results, boosting ROI, and delivering mature leads to your sales team. Being able to attribute revenue properly through each of your marketing activities is key to knowing where to place your resources to fuel growth. 

What to Track 

Basic metrics like lead volume and website traffic are important, but failing to dive deeper means you could be missing out on key insights into your marketing performance and valuable opportunities for improvement. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) to Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) ratio, unengaged subscribers, and other advanced marketing metrics will give you deeper insight into what’s driving your success and where you should focus your attention.

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are generally defined as bottom-of-the-funnel prospects who have indicated they’re ready to purchase, or at least talk to a salesperson, by downloading buying guides, requesting a demo, or signing up for a free trial. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) are those potential customers whom sales determines are ready for a direct follow-up. 

Looking at the percentage of MQLs that are accepted as SQLs is a good indicator of the health of your pipeline and your marketing team’s ability to qualify and screen leads. It’s also a great indication of how well your marketing and sales team are aligned and communicating with each other, since a low ratio raises a red flag that there’s a disconnect between marketing and sales. 

How to measure it? Divide the number of SQLs by the number of MQLs to calculate your MQL to SQL conversion rate. 

More Resources

If you’re looking for more top-level coverage, a great starting resource is Hubspot’s Sales & Marketing Service Level Agreement, found here. But if you’re looking for a deep dive with tons of actionable insight, check out our book, Think Big, Scale Fast. 

We’re here to help with all your marketing needs, but if you need help scaling your sales, our friends at Sales Scaleur should be your first call. Founder Shima Zeroual and her team are experts in helping businesses grow their sales processes and teams, in a modern, integrated manner. 

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue. 

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time!