Marketing coaches have been around for some time, but marketing is something that’s constantly changing and evolving in line with new consumer trends and emerging technologies. As a result, the techniques of an effective marketing coach from 10 years ago will look somewhat different from a successful coach today.
What hasn’t changed is the impact a marketing coach can have on your small business. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to grow your business, a coach provides the insight, direction and support you’ll need to reach your goals while helping you to tackle some of the top challenges facing small and medium-sized businesses.
Various coaches may follow different approaches or have different areas of expertise, and so choosing the right person for your business can be a challenge. However, if you figure out exactly what goals you want to achieve, and take the time to find a reputable coach whose business values match your own, the choice becomes a whole lot easier.
Some of the key marketing areas a coach will help you improve include:
- More confidence to manage your marketing
- Keeping growth on track
- Staying on budget
- Generating a bigger ROI
- Providing a clear overview of your business (KPIs)
- Ongoing support when you need it
This article takes you through what a digital marketing coach can do for your small to medium-sized business, and what you’ll need to look out for to find the right person for the job.
More confidence to manage your marketing
If you want to market your small business yourself, there are usually a few barriers you’ll run into along the way. It’s likely that you’ll be taking on some of your own marketing responsibilities to keep costs down, but if you’re new to it, it quickly becomes a time-consuming (and continuous) task to learn the techniques, implement them, and keep managing them.
A marketing coach will work with you closely to build up your marketing knowledge while imparting lots of practical tips and direction on where to focus your time and efforts. The result is being able to execute an effective marketing strategy that you have the know-how to manage yourself.
This makes emerging online options for marketing and business coachings a great choice because you then have the opportunity to be flexible. If you’re unsure of something, you can hop onto a quick video call with your coach so that they can give you all the tailored tools, guidance, resources and assistance that you need.
Keeping growth on track and meeting your goals
Running a small business requires a lot of work and takes up a lot of time, so paying to have your entire marketing managed by an agency is often not an option for small growing businesses with restricted budgets. As a result, in the day-to-day running of things, it can be easy to lose sight of your all-important business goals.
However, a marketing coach will keep you on track by ensuring your business goals are defined and aligned with your overall marketing strategy. They’ll then make sure you have a clear path to achieve them through the use of SMART objectives (meaning they’re specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
Your coach should then measure your progress and hold you accountable for completing certain actions before the next coaching session. This works to keep you meeting your goals for growth and keeps you focused on meeting your goals.
Staying on budget
To lower costs, you may not have forked out for an in-house marketer or a marketing agency to run your marketing- but if you run a small business, time is most definitely money.
Spending too much time on certain marketing activities can reduce their profitability, but a marketing coach should know exactly where your time and effort should be spent. Not only that, but they will also have the tools and knowledge to help you speed up the process so that you can start benefiting from the income it produces sooner.
If your coach is doing their job right, you should see your marketing budget rise alongside your business growth, but that rise should also be compensated by higher profitability enabled by your marketing strategy.
Generate a bigger ROI (sustainably)
Marketing takes time (as well as a water-tight strategy) to start generating the kind of consistent results you want- after all, if you’ve not marketed before, you have the challenge of making an entire audience aware that your brand exists and can help fix their problem.
As a result, an effective marketing coach will take the time to understand your business and what your customers want/need from you before handing out advice. This is partly what makes coaching so valuable; all the help and advice is personal and tailored to exactly what your business needs.
Your coach should then take the time to understand what marketing activities will generate the biggest sustainable profit for your business. The word sustainable is key here. A coach who wants to generate business as fast as humanly possible, even if that means losing potential quality leads in the process, probably doesn’t have your business’s best interests at heart.
If your coach has discussed your short, mid and long term goals as well as the specific actions and objectives that are going to get you there, you can rest assured that their approach is following a sustainable approach, as they’re looking at the long-term.
The result? A sustainable and effective marketing strategy, along with a focus on business development, means your small business will see a greater ROI than if you were to rely on handing your marketing off to an agency alone or keeping it in-house with a single person without the insight of a seasoned coach.
Providing a clear overview of your business (KPIs)
Knowing how well your marketing is working, and why, is incredibly important. Without that visibility, you could be wasting time, money and effort on marketing actions that simply aren’t paying off.
To understand how your marketing is performing and how it’s impacting the rest of your business, there are some key performance indicators that you’ll need to keep track of. These include aspects such as:
- Website traffic
- What pages on your website are visited most
- How long people spend on your site
- Email click-through rates
- Customer conversion rates
An effective marketing coach will make time to understand where your business stands before they start supporting you by offering a free marketing review, and will keep close track of all the important metrics on an ongoing basis.
Ongoing support when you need it
Last but not least, any marketing coach should provide ongoing support, and as you grow your business, you should find that there’s significant value in continuing to seek support from your coach, even if you feel your marketing is at the top of its game.
This is because marketing is never a fixed thing. One approach that works well now might not be as impactful a few years down the line- it’s a marketing coaches job to keep their ear to the ground about emerging trends and potential digital disruption, which can save you from a variety of costly pitfalls and keep your efforts focused on where the biggest pay-off lies for your business.
Conclusion
Ultimately, a marketing coach will provide the direction you need by focusing on the marketing that will bring the biggest impact and helping you figure out exactly what you can manage yourself, or whether there are any essential marketing activities that you should be outsourcing. As a result, an effective coach can help you achieve the growth you’ve been trying to reach for your small business.
And for one final piece of advice: If you’re not sure whether the marketing coach you’re considering is reputable enough, take a look at the number of recommendations from others, what case-studies they have, as well as their existing network- the best coaches spend a lot of time building credibility along with a rich network that they’ll introduce you to if relevant, something they can’t do without integrity, sustainability, and a track record of getting results.
If you’d like to find out more about what a highly effective digital marketing coach can help your small business achieve, register for your free digital marketing review here.
