Global supply chain issues, labor challenges, and inflation are expected to continue challenging businesses throughout 2023. Therefore, it is essential to refine your small business marketing strategies and find what’s most effective to help limit the potential adverse business impact.
It very well might be that whoever has the more creative solutions for their customers’ needs will win the business. So, consider these small business marketing strategies to help position you for success in 2023.
5 Small Business Marketing Strategies
1. Communicate with Customers & Prospects (or find someone to do it for you)
Given the supply chain challenges, you’re already looking to secure alternate sources for raw materials and services you need to keep your business running. You already know that not many customers are willing to wait 4-6 months for something, especially if your competitor can fulfill their order in half the time.
On the other hand, if you are all in the same boat (probably anchored somewhere outside of a harbor on the West Coast), then perhaps you’ll need to find an alternate solution to meet your customers’ needs.
If you have inventory readily available or a service that your company can immediately deploy, let people know!
- Take to social media to spread the word
- Consider a making short clip for TikTok
- Promote your availability of products and services in an email newsletter
- Create a series of emails featuring your product/service and send them weekly to your email list
The point is, you need to communicate with customers and prospects. Let them know you’re available and ready to support them.
2. Outsourcing Communication
Some small businesses do not want to focus their efforts on marketing or may not have the tools needed to communicate effectively with their customer base, let alone get the attention of prospects. Whatever the case, it’s OK!
Look for a third party to help with marketing and communication efforts on your behalf. There are many advantages of focusing on your key objectives and letting someone else help support the peripheral activities.
3. Contact Centers, BPOs, and Call Centers
Many contact centers have evolved into what’s known as Business Process Outsourcing, or BPO. This means they support businesses for multiple functions, like customer service, tech support, marketing, sales, and much more.
One of the many benefits of a BPO, contact center, or call center (people are known to use these terms interchangeably) is this: rather than hire someone at an inflated labor rate to do one function, have a BPO do it all for you.
BPOs attract, hire, and train employees for your business, more often than not, at a reduced cost. It’s one of the many small business marketing strategies that succeeds time and time again.
4. Addressing Labor Challenges
With a staggering number of employees opting out of the workforce, how do you find the right people for your business at a price you can afford?
One effective small business marketing strategy to consider is not hiring internally to support services that are not considered your core business.
Crazy? Let me explain.
The right BPO has access to the best talent. With the transition to work from home models, there aren’t typically geographical limitations for hiring.
Outsourcing to a BPO also allows business owners to find highly skilled workers in specific areas where needed. Therefore, it won’t likely come with an inflated premium as with your local labor market.
5. Reducing Costs with a Shared Model
It’s a fact that outsourcing reduces business costs. Here’s an example.
You have three employees responsible for handling customer service phone calls. Even though they aren’t each busy with calls 8 hours during the day, you need to have a bit of a buffer when calls overlap. In this scenario, your payroll cost for this position is 24 hours daily. Of course, that’s just their salaries, but what about the overhead?
BPOs offer several different pricing models. Overhead is part of the inclusive cost.
One example is a shared model where you don’t have an entire dedicated front-line team for your business. Instead, a shared model allows sharing resources with other BPO clients.
In this case, you may find that you pay for the actual time the customer service agents are active for your business.
There is also a per minute vs. per hourly rate consideration. But, again, you might be surprised at the cost analysis because of the net cost of labor per hour instead of a call center charging a per minute or per hour rate.
Supporting Your Sales Team
You can never ignore the fact that despite all the challenges facing small businesses, you still need to sell. Selling means reaching customers and prospects, and maybe your sales team can’t do it all. Get them help.
Keep your sales team focused on existing customers staying happy and closing business with new products and services. Use a proven and successful BPO to do the time-consuming and tedious activities that challenge your sales team.
Quality Contact Solutions is proud to be a part of the AnswerNet family. To see our full suite of services, click the button below. If you would like to get in touch with our team, give us a call at 1 (866) 963-2889 or submit a request for a customized price quote here.
Steve Korn is a Business Development Executive for Quality Contact Solutions, an AnswerNet Company. Steve’s experience spans 40 years and includes ownership of his own call center for more than 20 years plus experience in B2C telemarketing and in-house B2B call center management. His core strength is in working with small and medium sized companies in designing and implementing programs for lead generation and appointment setting. Steve can be reached at steve.korn@answernet.com or 516-656-4198.
