Creating a marketing strategy for your business is not a walk in the park for most small business owners. While it’s very necessary, it can be confusing to know where to start, hard to track performance, and there’s those too-many-tasks to manage (so,  yeah—pretty overwhelming!).

That’s why learning how to simplify your marketing is one of the most important things you can do as a small business owner. Instead of overcomplicating it, which is shockingly easy to do, start with these tips to build a small business marketing strategy that actually works for you. 

The cliff notes of how to simplify your small business marketing strategy are here, but keep reading because we’re going to walk you through all of the steps below:

1. Stick to your MUST-HAVE marketing tools
2. Build workflows for consistency
3. Automate routine tasks
4. Focus on content that resonates
5. Track what works (and what doesn’t)
6. Delegate and/or outsource strategically

Why Strategy First?

Before we jump in though, you need a marketing strategy before you try to move onto the next steps. Marketing tactics without strategy is literally like sailing into the ocean without a map or a radar. You’ll have no idea where you’re going or what you’re doing, you’re just kind of out there in the open—it’s the same for your business. 

Plus, there’s no excuses. Enji’s marketing strategy generator can literally whip up a plan for you in 5 minutes. Once you’ve got your strategy in front of you, you can move on to the next steps!

1. Stick to your MUST-HAVE marketing tools

As you’re creating and managing your marketing strategy, it can be tempting to get every tool out there. As a business owner, we know your Instagram is probably full of software ads—there’s literally a tool for everything! All with promises to make you millions of dollars and get your marketing for the month done in less than 3 mins.

But the truth is, juggling multiple platforms makes things inefficient and confusing. Let’s be honest—you already know you don’t want to remember 15 different passwords and have 10 tabs open every time you want to check in on your marketing efforts! 

Instead, try to find a platform that integrates multiple marketing tasks into one, simple solution. That’s where Enji comes into play! As an all-in-one marketing platform, Enji allows you to plan your strategy, schedule social media posts, create campaigns, and track your KPIs. Consider your marketing efforts consolidated!

2. Build Workflows for Consistency 

Next on the list of ways to simplify your small business marketing strategy, we have workflows. One of the secrets to a successful marketing strategy is consistency. But you really don’t need to be reinventing the wheel to come up with something brand new every month! 

Instead, we believe in turning your marketing strategy into repeatable workflows to take a lot of work off your plate. For example, each month you can start by creating a content calendar in the first week, then batch-create your content in the second week, and review your analytics toward the end of the month. 

You can set time on your calendar or set tasks for yourself to maintain these workflows. In fact, Enji syncs with your Google calendar so you can make sure you get timely notifications and stay on top of things.

3. Automate Routine Tasks 

There’s definitely creativity in marketing, but a lot of it is also the consistent, repetitive tasks that make up a marketing routine. 

We know one of the worst parts of following a marketing strategy is just finding the time, so make it easier on yourself with as much structure and automation as possible. 

A quick note about automation because lots of folks use this word and the real meaning has gotten a little lost! When something is truly automated, it’s “set it and forget it”. And when it comes to marketing automation, there are actually very few things you can truly automate as a small business owner. An example would be setting up a welcome email sequence to go out after someone signs up for your lead magnet. So keep this in mind as you look for ways to “automate” your marketing—most of it still requires a human touch!

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

We recommend blocking off time in your calendar to work on specific tasks each week, but you can also use a project management system (like Enji!) to set automated due dates and reminders that move your workflows forward.

For example, let’s say you have an hour blocked off each week to create social media content. If you have that set up as a recurring task, it’ll always be on your to-do list so you don’t forget. 

Once you’ve created your content and you complete that task, they can easily get everything added to Enji’s Social Media Scheduler, and then another task in a few days sends a reminder to check the analytics in the KPI Dashboard. No more software-switching! Enji truly does it all.

Setting up these processes, tasks, and reminders will help you stick with your marketing efforts and see a greater return on your efforts! 

4. Focus on Content That Resonates

Another pitfall of small business marketing is just kind of trying everything you can think of. Sure, if you throw spaghetti at the wall some of it will probably land on a plate, but that will take way too long and be way too messy. 

Instead, focus on marketing content that actually resonates with your audience. It’s not like it’s a secret—you have answers in your data! As long as you’re creating content, you can see what’s working through your KPI Dashboard. 

What type of social media posts are generating the most engagement? Which blog posts lead to the most signups? Answering these types of questions lets you know what wins with your ideal client–the messaging, positioning, and calls to action that drive them to interact with you! 

5. Track What Works (And What Doesn’t)

We’ve already mentioned it a couple of times throughout this post, and that’s because it’s so important: track 👏 your 👏marketing 👏.

By understanding your reports, you can make your marketing strategy as effective as possible. Just make sure you’re going beyond your vanity metrics—that means looking beyond your follower counts and pageviews to understand the content that’s driving your customers to take action. 

Within Enji’s KPI Dashboard, you can monitor metrics like leads and conversions to better understand if your marketing is driving a healthy sales pipeline. 

6. Delegate and/or Outsource Strategically

The last thing we want you to implement for a more simplified marketing strategy: you don’t have to do it alone! 

Always remember to delegate and outsource when you can. To do it strategically, think about the efforts that make more sense for you to be involved in, versus what seems to just be sucking up your time. Maybe you’re leading the overall strategy and goals, while your team members work on content creation and publishing. 

To make it even easier, you can add your team to Enji so they can use all the tools you need for your business. 

As you can tell, we're big fans of simplifying your small business marketing strategy. Watch this video for even more ideas!

Simplify Your Small Business Marketing Strategy

Simplifying your marketing strategy takes planning, and in some ways it can be even harder than over-complicating it. It also takes the right tools. With Enji, you can completely transform your marketing so that it’s easier to manage and more effective. Just take it from our customers!

“ENJI has been nothing short of a revelation for our marketing strategy. User-friendly from the get-go, this tool has taken the guesswork out of our campaigns and replaced it with data-driven confidence. We LOVE it!” - Anna

If you know you’ve been making this whole “marketing thing” harder than it needs to be, start your free trial with Enji today! We will have you on the right track in under ten minutes!