How To Break Your Current Turnover Glass Ceiling.

Growing your business beyond your current turnover could potentially be one of the biggest challenges you'll ever face. While many small business owners can chip away to slowly raise revenues, all too often there's a financial glass ceiling that can feel impossible to break. And by tackling your glass ceiling incorrectly, you could end up in a world of trouble, so you need to tread carefully.

Many of the clients using inboundio are small business owners and entrepreneurs who launched their company off-the-cuff, and now spend all of their time working silly hours to get to the financial position they are today. 

We've huge respect for anyone who can take an idea or skill, and turn it into a profitable business. However, as you grow things get messier, systems fall apart, and your marketing may need a complete overhaul as you go from "word of mouth referrals", to having to support an entire team.

In the UK, this "revenue glass ceiling" is so prevalent, that the UK government has stepped in. Goldman Sachs and The Enterprise Research Council estimated that 110,000 SME (small to medium businesses) could export their products if they had the right systems and marketing channels in place. 

So How Do You Break Your Financial Glass Ceiling? 

One of the areas we want to focus on is marketing because of course, it's what we know best as the owners of a marketing automation tool. It's near impossible to list all of the glass ceiling barriers, but marketing is one you can address right now. 
 
When it comes to marketing, one of the biggest boundaries is the "systems and processes" smaller companies have in place. Most SME businesses have somewhat of an ad-hoc marketing plan, and even if you have a dedicated full-time marketing person, chances are that you're still manually running a lot of your marketing that could be automated. 

Here's how you automate your marketing:

1. Set-up a content marketing strategy.

The simplest way to do this is to sit down and map out the next 6-12 months of articles to write for your Blog. Because no matter what channels you market your products or services on, all roads should lead back to your website or Blog. If you publish some content on Facebook, get people back to your website first and foremost. When you sit down to write your 6-12 months of Blog topics, start with the topics that will be most valuable to your customers. For example, a dentist may have:

Email 1: Are you overbrushing your teeth?
Email 2: How do you choose the right toothpaste?
Email 3: Here's how you identify a potential cavity. 
Email 4: What to ask your dentist during your next visit?

As you can see, these topics help people, and the dentist that publishes this information will be the dentist people 'perceive' as the local experts.

2. Post your Blog content on Social Media.

Oddly, many businesses create amazing Blog articles but don't post them out through their social media channels. If your Blog content is valuable, then you could seriously be missing a lot of potential customers and revenue. To help automate your social media posts, you can use tools like inboundio to post directly to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn - to direct people back to your Blog post to read your article. Just make sure you monitor your social channels so you can reply quickly to people who are interacting with your content and brand.

3. Get an Email Marketing series together.

What happens after you get a lead? Do you follow-up with the prospect? How many times? Email marketing puts your following-up on autopilot. You can send an email every X amount of days to check in, without lifting a finger. Likewise, you can keep your established clients in the loop and provide valuable information to keep them returning. In the dentist example, you could essentially use the same content for converting new prospects as you do for creating customer loyalty.

TIP: Consider reusing your Blog content for your email marketing series. 

4. Setup Landing Pages if you use AdWords.

If you are yet to use a Landing Page, we'd recommend reading this article first: https://www.inboundio.com/blog/landing-pages-vs-your-website-do-you-need-both. A Landing Page can quickly boost your PPC marketing returns, and you can grab the emails or details that you capture from your Landing Page to feed back into your email marketing series.

5. Put it all together.

With the steps above, we've essentially created a content marketing funnel that you can put your marketing on autopilot. This will help you break your glass ceiling as you can spend more time elsewhere in your business. You can also measure every step of your marketing funnel, so you can consistently tweak your content. This is the power of marketing automation software like inboundio.

Like To Break Your Glass Ceiling?

Getting your marketing right is the first step, and you can start that right now with www.inboundio.com, the small business marketing automation tool to help you grow your business beyond your current revenue glass ceiling.