How to Scale your Marketing without more Staff

It may have happened to you, businesses often hit a ceiling where marketing demands just outgrow their internal resources, but simply hiring more staff is sometimes unrealistic. So how do you get around this?

• Identifying time-sucking activities and optimising with the help of AI can free up precious time for your business.

• Centralising data and streamlining workflows will speed things up while protecting against personnel changes.

• Working with an expert partner can bring more insight into your business, for less.

At Flow, we’re experts in all things Fulfilment, Print and 3PL. In our latest blog we’re delving into how businesses can upscale and level up their marketing, without the costly overheads of expanding their internal team. Jacob has laid out three key insights for any businesses who find themselves in this difficult situation.

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1. Automate and Optimise with AI

This stage starts with identification, looking at the repetitive tasks that clog up your team’s days, such as social posting, reporting, email flows or print ordering. Once you know what the big-time killers are, your team can focus on researching and introducing AI tools to speed up these processes and automate where necessary. Tools such as automated email nurture sequences, that keep customers on the journey without manual involvement, or AI chatbots which interact with customers on your behalf, can be powerful for this, keeping customers at the early stage of your process engaged without the hassle this used to take.

AI tools can also massively speed up the content creation process, supporting through idea generation, first drafts and structural plans.

Meanwhile, introducing AI Analytics can help to build reports, spot trends and flag issues in your data, without humans even getting involved. But why is this important?

Freeing up your team’s time on day-to-day tasks means that they can step back and focus on the bigger picture, exploring wider marketing strategy and how these fit into the business’ overall growth.

2. Streamline your Workflow and Data

As with AI automation, streamlining your workflows begins with a diagnosis stage. Taking time to map your current marketing processes can help to identify inefficiencies, duplicated work and bottlenecks. Your business can then identify how these could be sped up, with a little more work in the short term, saving time in the long run.

Examples of this could be centralising your CRM or marketing automation platform, making sure that everything’s in one place, and aligned. Integrating these systems with print management, fulfilment, e-commerce and analytics platforms can then create smooth handovers and make once difficult processes effortless. Finally, using standardised templates, sign off processes and workflows will help to formalise any internal processes, making them easier to review in the future.

And this has the same effect: time saved to focus on the big picture, with once time-consuming processes happening seamlessly. Creating standardised, centralised systems and processes will then also protect your business from the risks posed by turnover of staff and losing vital information and knowledge with employees.

3. Find your Strategic Partner

Partnering with a specialist marketing, print and fulfilment agency gives you instant access to a range of skills and tools that weren’t previously available to your business. Working with an external, strategic supplier can help to bring both strategy and execution to your business for less than the price of a new employee.

Outsourcing specific channels and aspects of the marketing mix such as print marketing, leaflet distribution and Direct Mail will free up your team’s capacity to focus on their core channels, and account-based, internal activities. Finding a partner can also help you work collaboratively with others, and benefit from their specialities and expertise, without losing control of your overall brand.

At Flow, we’re specialists in Print, Fulfilment, 3PL and more. To partner with us and help with scaling up your marketing, get in touch with our expert team today!