Most marketers can’t help but generate countless creative ideas to generate leads, drive revenue or increase brand awareness and engagement. After all, it’s one of the most fun parts of the job! But at some point, we marketers have to sit down and make decisions about which of these ideas are most realistic and have the most potential to be successful in achieving our business objectives.
Between content, ABM, PPC, SEO, email and the endless other marketing opportunities, where do you actually start?
Find the Marketing Tactics Right for Your Company
Nick Peddle, Demand Generation Manager at Robocorp, joined us for a Marketing Expert Chat episode to share his wisdom about how companies can determine the right marketing activities that will help them scale their business. He breaks it down into 3 key steps:
1. Experiment & Fail
2. Always Double Dip!
3. Accept That You Can’t Do It All
He also shares his thoughts on the benefits of partnering with external agencies (which we can’t help but support!) and freelancers to help you tackle all of your marketing objectives.
Check out the video now for a fresh perspective on figuring out what marketing tactics might be best suited for your organization!
Video Transcript:
CAROLINE: Hi, today I’m here with Nick Peddle. Nick is a demand gen hero with experience in the agency world, on the corporate side. He’s worked in B2B Tech a lot and now he is the Demand Generation Manager at Robocorp. Nick, thank you so much for being here with me today.
NICK: Yeah, thank you for having me.
CAROLINE: So, Nick today I’d like to talk about how to choose which marketing activities to implement when working in a marketing organization that is fairly small and is gonna have limited time, limited budgets, limited resources. So, what would be your advice to marketers as far as choosing the right marketing activities to enable them to scale?
NICK: Yeah, absolutely, I think this is a very common challenge that marketers face especially in small organizations and small marketing teams. So, I really like to touch on three different pieces of advice. The first is to experiment and fail first. The second is to double dip wherever and whenever possible. And the third is to understand and accept that you can’t do everything.
So going back to number one, one of our core values at Robocorp is result to driven action, and I think this sums it up perfectly. So, we wanna take action. We want to avoid analysis paralysis, but we do have to consider our future needs. So, I like to… I’m a big fan of HubSpot. I’ve been accused of being on their payroll or getting free t-shirts from them, I talk about them so much. I’m still waiting for maybe a t-shirt at some point from HubSpot because, HubSpot, I truly love your product. You know, a tool like HubSpot is a way to get going immediately to jump in and start using their email tools, their social media tools and some of their automation tools, and it can scale with you. And so that’s why I’m a big fan of it, as you can sign up and start using it the same day. And it can also scale to as large as you know, it’s probably good for most organizations, for at least a few years’ worth of growth. And so that’s why I think it’s a perfect example of jumping in, taking action but also considering what those future needs might be and it can accomplish those.
The second is double-dipping. I mean, if you’re creating a blog post for example and you have a blog post to topic written and in mind for the awareness stage what other uses can that same company have for a later stage in the buyer’s journey? Can we take some of this content, can we repurpose it into a sales sheet? Or can we use some of it in an email sequence? And if you do that, it’s gonna feel like you’re creating twice as much content as you actually are. And the real-life example I’ve had requests from sales teams to create a certain collateral and sure, that’s yes, I can do that. And I can create the outline what it’s gonna be, what the purpose is, and get the graphic designer involved. But then I can take that same kind of core content and turn it into a blog post. So, it can actually go both ways. So, double-dipping, it’s not cheating and it’s really made your life more efficient.
CAROLINE: Definitely.
NICK: Yeah. Third, again, understand and accept you can’t do everything, and I think this is a big one. Think in terms of opportunity costs. So, if you’re going to invest your time into running a paid ads campaign, then be okay with the fact that you’re not creating content and budget of course for a large-scale SEO content campaign. That’s okay, I think under thinking in terms of opportunity cost is really key here because if we’re going to do X, no we’re not doing Y and that’s okay, as long and then with the cut through your conversation with your team with your executive team, they may say no we really actually wanna do Y. Okay, we can do that, but that means let’s put X on hold. I think that’s why I like to think in terms of opportunity costs.
And the last thing I’ll say is just breathe take a deep breath, it’s gonna be okay. You know, I think it’s a stressful position to be in and in early stage small, you know, early-stage companies, small companies, small marketing team. You have a limited number of resources, nobody expects you to accomplish and perform the same way as a company with a large team and much more resources. So just accept that and understand that and it’s going to be okay.
CAROLINE: Awesome, well Nick I really appreciate this. Yeah, I can relate with all of this, so many past lives and I think the third point is like incredibly important, right? Like, accept you’re not gonna do everything because you can’t, you just can’t. And I think that’s a really big risk in this because if you try to do everything, you’re not gonna accomplish anything, so yeah.
NICK: And you know, I think this is a good opportunity to say, there is a place for agency partners to take some of that burden off. You know, in my personal belief, unless you have an organization, a marketing team where you have you know five or even 10 people on a marketing team then you shouldn’t be placing any paid search ads or Google ads yourself. That’s the perfect place to outsource because you need to have a certain amount of bandwidth and time to spend on that. And so that’s why I’m a strong believer and trusting a partner to do that. And focusing your own in-house resources on other activities. So, finding and relying on a good partner is also I guess a key point to make.
CAROLINE: Right, obviously I cannot agree with this more.
NICK: We didn’t plan this, I wasn’t gonna, you know like, she didn’t say plug agency partners but you know it’s the truth.
CAROLINE: Yeah, I know it’s the truth, and I’ve been in that exact same position actually before joining ProperExpression when I was running marketing, I was in a one-person marketing team right? And that was just too much, I could not run ads by myself, I could not publish like four blogs a month by myself when I had to like work on the interior marketing strategy and work on the product pages, and work on sales enablement and seeking sales calls to understand what kind of content we should produce right? And finding the right marketing partner that I could depend on, right? To do the legwork, like enabled me to bring the results, and so, yeah, that’s also really good advice.
NICK: Okay, and then the last thing I guess I’ll add is that relying on you know not just partners so it doesn’t have to be a large-scale agency, sorry ProperExpression, but it could be a freelance writer to help with some contractor content writing. And of course, you need to be careful of what topics you assigned to freelancers. But I’ve found that I can spend half an hour putting together a good brief for a writer to get a good blog post that it might take me two hours to write myself or even more. That’s obviously that time saved and of course need the budget resources to give to a contractor. But the contractors can take less maintenance time than depending on what you want them to do they can take less maintenance time than an agency. So, finding the right partner and the right help for the right needs to fill your needs to fit into your puzzle the right way is important too.
CAROLINE: Absolutely, well Nick thank you so much, I think that’s great advice. Definitely, if you’re in a small marketing organization you need to follow this. Write it down, put it on your desk, follow this advice. So, thank you for joining us.
NICK: Yeah, thank you so much for having me
