How Marketing and Business Development Drive Small Business
You're a small business and trying to keep up with everything...Not easy.
Whether you've acknowledged it or not, you are using marketing and business development to drive your small business and find growth.
Business development is about developing your products and partnerships as well as growing into new markets. Marketing is an exchange of offerings to clients for value and communicates your brand message.
This combination has always driven small business but the changing times has given them a new perspective.
What's the Difference?
Marketing is a way to convey the message of your brand. Traditionally, marketing was outbound, which included methods like advertising in the local paper, radio station, or tv network.
But things have changed since moving online and advertising has become more inbound. SEO, email, google ads, facebook ads.
The point of advertising online is to bring the customer to you and offer an experience that becomes undeniable to the visitor.
In the traditional model it was hard for small-businesses to become visible because of a high barrier to entry but inbound marketing allows small-businesses access to the platforms and tools capable of getting their message to their audience.
Business Development on the other hand involves many moving parts of business growth.
Anything action that a business takes for the eventual gain of business growth is contributing to the development of the business.
It's an umbrella. Marketing lives under it and so does personnel, services, products, customer service, distribution, manufacturing, organization, sales, and pretty much any other activity you can think of.
The mistake that can be made is when businesses forget to include marketing as part of their development process.
By only improving what is happening within the business without the dedication to making your brand more visible, it's an uphill battle to remain relevant and find a consistent drive of new customers.
Give people an opportunity to find and connect with you while you grow internally.
How Do They Work Together?
As I mentioned, business development is the umbrella that marketing lives under.
Marketing should always live under this umbrella. It contributes to the growth of the business so it would be considered an asset to it's development.
But, there is a common problem among the two that causes a business to believe they may be different even though they lead towards the same goals.
Since marketing involves bringing in new customers and making the brand more visible, traditionally it was hard to determine financial gain. Sales were a different area of business development that could easily determine what was working or not.
But now that businesses have moved online it is necessary to think of the two as working together rather than keep separate.
You can now track website data using Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to check direct sales and determine which part of the process might be holding things back.
You can track how many visitors come to your site from Facebook and set up a separate landing page to track Instagram visitors for social media data.
You can even use marketing through online advertising to track HR data for hiring new employees or finding freelancers through Upwork or Fiverr.
What's The Future Look Like?
The power of being online has forced its way into being a major consideration in every small business development and marketing plan.
Eventually we wont look at them separately but understand that marketing is a major piece of the development process.
With new technology coming out every year and the unbelievable pace at which it improves, expect small business to adopt marketing into business development faster than corporations.
Especially younger entrepreneurs will understand the connection and need.
We are an online world and we expect immediate gratification. Small businesses have an opportunity to not only be a part of that conversation but drive the conversation to the ultimate goal of online acceptance.
Marketing is a unique part of your business in the sense that you get to play around with all the new toys. It's a way to discover how these tools contribute to the growth and development of your business while remaining relevant and contemporary.
Where To Find The Professionals
There are a number of online sites that I recommend pulling a team from.
Indeed.com is a site I recommend highly. Indeed is a marketplace for businesses and employees looking to make a professional connection.
I also recommend trying to network through Linkedin. This platform has grown to Facebook like levels for their professional facilitation and is often underused for connecting with potential partners.
I'd also recommend just googling "marketing business development jobs" and seeing what pops up. They do a great job at populating answers from around the web and showing you what's relevant.
Conclusion
Traditionally, marketing was left out of business development because it was hard to measure the financial success.
Now that businesses have moved online and marketing has changed to include an entirely new way to communicate to your audience it is necessary to include marketing as part of every small businesses development.
And the best part is that everything is much more accessible and entrepreneurs have more control over their message and how it interacts with other parts of the business.
There really isn't any reason to separate the two at this point and more than likely you are already headed in that direction.
Still confused? Leave a comment below and we can figure it out together!
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Send me a message if you need some guidance or help in setting up an online plan for your business.