Small teams and solopreneurs tend to play multiple roles and wear various hats to ensure everything runs smoothly. Sometimes that equates to limited resources, leaving a business without a dedicated marketing person, or hiring an agency to help them reach their full potential.

That’s why I’ve put together a list of effective strategies for expanding marketing efforts when working with limited resources or a small team:

1. Create a culture that naturally encourages referrals.
   Create a brand culture that people like to talk about. The best referrals come from the people you know. Who knows you better than your team? When your team loves the work they’re doing, when it plays to their passions in life, and when they feel like they’re part of a bigger vision and purpose, they’ll become your biggest champions. They’ll share your story and your work, both on and off the clock.
2. Strategically streamline your team’s responsibilities.
   When you strategically consolidate the roles of hybrid team members (those who execute multiple job functions), you can maximize efficiencies and workflows. By putting expert producers in the roles they produce the best in, you can conserve time and resources, allowing you to accomplish more while doing it more efficiently.
3. Focus on one marketing channel at a time.
   Smaller teams sometimes overextend themselves when they try to take on a multichannel approach right out of the gate. While multichannel strategies are best and most effective in general, you’ll be better off to start with what you know you can effectively maintain before diving into another marketing channel. Failure to maintain a dozen or more channels efficiently will hurt your brand more than it will help. Instead, focus on the channel that the largest number of your prospects rely on and go all-in on that channel. Then, once you’re ready to scale, add a second to the mix.
4. Create an editorial/content calendar.
   Planning is key. Though it may feel like a lot of work to create a content calendar quarterly or annually, the payoff in time saved is exponential. Creating a calendar will help you meet deadlines, optimize your content for sharing, and keep your team on track and accountable.
5. Repurpose your content.
   One of the best ways to expand your marketing efforts with limited resources is to recycle old content. For example, you can easily turn a blog post into a newsletter, social media post, a video series, or even a webinar. Be smart and strategic with the resources you have and think outside the box to get information out in multiple formats through repurposing.
6. Install a chatbot on your website.
   Chatbots are a great tool when built well. You can use chatbots to handle simple customer requests like password changes, which will free up support staff for more challenging support requests. Additionally, adding a chat feature to your website can increase the number of prospects willing to engage with your brand by initiating that first contact through the chat, allowing your sales team to work more inbound leads.
7. Remember the Pareto principle.
   The Pareto principle says 80% of results come from 20% of efforts. If you have minimal resources, identify your 20% and direct your best efforts on this portion. Later, when you’re able to scale, you can onboard more people or hire an agency so that you can go back to the other 80% in a more effective and focused manner to make them efficient and worthwhile.
8. Work with an agency.
   When you work with an agency, they should act as an extension of your team. Hiring an agency can be a much lower risk and much more cost-effective than hiring an entire internal marketing team. An agency also brings additional expertise, technology, and relationships to the table.

Just because you may be running with a lean team doesn’t mean your marketing efforts have to suffer. After all, marketing is an investment in your business growth and shouldn’t be neglected. So, be sure to make it a priority for your brand.

Whether you need to strategically restructure your team’s responsibilities, or start a conversation with us on how we can help you grow, be sure to give your brand the marketing attention it needs to thrive.