This document provides marketing tips for small and medium sized businesses. It emphasizes that marketing is a collaborative process that involves communicating accurately about a company and its products. Businesses should understand their marketing context by mapping customer touchpoints and involving other departments. Research should be done on competitors and customer pain points before developing marketing materials. When starting, focus on the essential activities and prioritize automation to maximize effectiveness while minimizing effort. Continually test, track data, and improve based on results.

1. Marketing Essentials Your SMB Needs
Learn from the big guys, and don’t sweat the small stuff.
Best practices from Google, Capgemini & more
Irena Pawłowski, Pulse

2. Get your head on straight
Marketing is:
• A mouth piece your business
• An essential business enabler
• Deeply collaborative
• Process driven
• Iterative
Marketing is not
• Is not a bunch of channels
• An independent exercise
• The same for each company
• Something you set up once
• Unmeasurable
There’s a lot of noise….

3. Understand your context
Your marketing context is not just potential
customers you want to reach.
It’s the all the people you need to work with to
create and deliver the most accurate information
about your company and products to the world.

4. Make sure your speaking the same
language
• Be skeptical about what you already know about your customers
• Think about your entire communication cycle.
• Where are you customer touch points?
• Map all the people really involved in your marketing processes. HINT: it’s
not just marketing
Align your message to your customers’ pain points

5. Do your research
• Check out what your competition is doing not just from the point
of view of their product and services.
• See what customers in your space respond to the most.
Confirm your assumptions before you start your work

6. Start with the essentials
• Make a list all the activities you’d like to be doing
• Make a list of materials you need to make for that to happen.
Now put it is a safe place and forget about it.
• Concentrate on making an MVP of marketing materials based on your research.
• What you need as a B2B will be different then as a B2C.
Prioritize! It’s easy to get overwhelmed

7. Define the right channels
• Decide on one channel that is best supported by your business case.
• Expand only once you start you have it really well handled and
automated.
• Don’t listen to anyone who tells you “you need to do x” because it’s the
hottest new thing. Sometimes snapchat or twitter are just not worth your
while.
Don’t expect anyone to do it for it.

8. Tools, tools, tools
Automate what you can… but DON’T go crazy.
• Your tools are only as good as your data.
• Sometimes a well managed spreadsheet is better than having a ton of
tools that are rarely understood and rarely used.
• Be prepared to make mistakes. It’s ok. REALLY.

9. Get addicted to data
• Test, Test, Test
• Your data is the most important piece of your business, so use it!
• But don’t forget the human element, all data need informed
interpretation
Track everything

10. If it’s not repeatable, you’re doing it
wrong
• Automation is not just about sending updates and emailers
• It’s about doing the hard work up front, and making the most out of it:
That means you need to automate your content production
processes
Minimize your effort to maximize you effectiveness

11. Get the right help
• You will make mistakes
• Invest in self-motivated people who are hungry to learn and improve
• Avoid expensive agencies at all costs until you know what you need.
• Don’t get caught in the trap of trying to be everywhere and do everything
Building the right team the first time is hard.

12. Be systematic
• Document everything: random actions lead to random results
• Understand the rules of the game
• Take care to set and report metrics on a monthly and quarterly basis
• Take the results and improve what you can by putting it in your
marketing pipeline.

13. In Summary
• Understand what marketing means for your business
• Put in mechanisms to work cross-functionally
• Get informed about the market, your competitors
• Do all the heavy lifting up front.
• Do one thing well and then expand and improve
• Track everything: your data is the lifeblood of your
companies success.

14. Thanks!