We’re moving right along in our third series of #B2BTalks, this time bringing you three marketing experts from vastly different backgrounds. When talking about scaling, it’s important to recognize that every company, no matter big or small, faces similar challenges. Across the board, marketing budgets and people power always tend to be the hot topics. Instead of backing down, with some careful analysis and planning, you can use your challenges to your advantage, moving your business forward.

Here we offer 8 expert tips to help cope with some of your biggest marketing challenges, starting with everyone’s favorite, your marketing budget.

Getting the most out of your marketing budget

  1. Small companies should take advantage of free resources, such as social networking and local Meetup Groups, in order to leverage existing infrastructure, while investing most of their money in product development and R&D. Outsourcing is also a great way to reduce costs.
  2. Invest in a great product as well as customer service. If your users aren’t ecstatic about after the first time they use your product, then they aren’t going to come back.
  3. Planning is imperative in a big company, where the scaling of activities is very complex. Aligning global marketing efforts and activities, though a difficult process, is effective and efficient in saving time and money as well as generatingimproved results.The better you plan, the better you can understand your resources and where to utilize them next.
  4. All marketing efforts must be measured, because without measuring the specific business processes that you do, you don’t know where to invest your next dollar.

Maximizing people power

  1. Managing a person whose time you can’t completely fill is counter-productive.  Don’t hire anybody new until the entire team is fully exhausted and even then, only hire when you are fully confident that the new person’s time can be completely filled.
  2. When searching for great marketing people, you should hire people with strong analytical skills that can assist the company in many ways. We’re moving from a world of artsy marketing to science, which requires a different set of skills than in the past.

Productive distribution of internal resources

  1. Discipline is key! A company can learn new things if it is able to identify the key processes on an on-going basis, define them and measure them.
  2. Automate as much as possible in order to reduce the fluff. If any activity done internally doesn’t provide value to the client or company, then it’s less important and should be eliminated. Consider a Project Management tool to reduce the noise of endless internal emails.

These are just a few of the tips our experts offer when facing their marketing challenges. For more, be sure to watch the video. Do you have a tip to share? Leave us a comment below, or tweet us at @PravdaMG.