Most businesses, small and large, are not great at marketing!

To help other small companies, I wanted to share my experience implementing a marketing program. It took me eight years (It will take you less time if you don't make the same mistakes I did.) to generate leads via our marketing program, but it has been worth the effort since we get 2 to 4 new clients yearly from these efforts. (This means another $200,000 to $500,000 in additional annual revenue.)

I would like to give you an overview of my business so you can better relate to the information I provide below. Connexis Search Group is a Life Science, permanent placement recruiting firm. I joined the firm 22 years ago and was a minority partner until 10 years ago when I bought out the founding partner. Connexis employs 20 recruiters, and we place candidates in North America and the UK.

After buying out the founding partner, I realized I needed to create a marketing program. The founding partner is a great person with incredible sales skills, and he always said not to get too strategic and make phone calls to secure new clients. It did not take me too long to realize that I could not call all the viable prospects—I needed a marketing plan to help me.

Eight years ago, after attending a mastermind session with David Finkel’s company, Maui Mastermind, I realized I needed a marketing program to help deliver leads. My coach at Maui Mastermind helped me start developing a marketing program. Some of the things I did work better than others, and I hope I can help you reduce the time and keep costs low by learning from my mistakes.

Here are the changes I made to get my marketing program generating leads.

• Updated our website: Our first website was not designed to secure leads.
  We added a blog that we keep updated with fresh content monthly, case studies, and premium content. (Premium content is so helpful that your prospects will give you their email to download. If you are starting with a limited budget,  you can use WIX or Square to build your website. I prefer WordPress because if you need a certain function or app on your website, it is a lot more likely that WordPress will have access to the said app; you will likely want to hire a programmer to help you create a WordPress site.
  
  
• Once your website is running, writing blogs is next.
  A blog should contain keywords that are appropriate for your business and should be at least 600 words. Blogs will help you attract prospects to your website. Writing blogs is much easier now that we have Chat GPT and other AI services to assist you. (We have created an AI tool to help us write blogs.) Ensure you carefully check over any AI work done; it's good, great even, but imperfect. 
  
  
• Marketing automation tools are essential in helping you smoothly post content (blogs) to your website and social media accounts. We started off using MailChimp, which is effective and inexpensive.   As we increase the frequency of adding blogs to our website and social media posts, we decided to upgrade to HubSpot. Even though HubSpot is much more expensive, it saves time.
  
  
• Social media is crucial to your marketing success.
  You must post daily on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Pick one platform to start and add additional platforms as you perfect your primary one. We use LinkedIn as our primary social media platform.
  
  
• Email marketing and Surveys. 
  If you have an existing database of clients, then email marketing is another excellent way to stay in touch with your prospects.   I also like to send surveys using Survey Monkey.
  
  
• Case studies to attract new prospects and provide proof sources for your sales team.
  You can view our case studies on our website.   Notice how we use our clients’ names and do not anonymize them.
  
  
• Premium content is the pinnacle of marketing.
  You are offering something of value to your prospects, so they are willing to give you their email address, name, etc. Premium content can be an e-book, compilation of survey information, or any data or information your prospects value. For example, my recruiting firm gathered salaries for all the positions we typically fill. This piece of premium content is downloaded constantly from our website. You can view our premium content here.
  
  
• Podcasts
  These are other great ways to attract prospects by providing helpful information. All businesses have clients that can be interviewed, resulting in information that can be helpful to others.
  
  
• Paid ads.
  We currently use Google ads and have figured out a way to rank #1 for the market segments we focus on. It took some effort to figure out this hack, but it also works and keeps costs down. We also tried LinkedIn ads with little success and much expense.

How did we (Connexis Search Group) learn marketing?  

I have always been a salesperson, not a marketing person. So, I had to learn marketing. I used a lot of resources, which I will attempt to list below.

Maui Mastermind is a program for small business owners, and they have a comprehensive program for business owners and their executives.   This is where I was first exposed to the importance of marketing.

SCORE: this is a free resource made available by the Small Business Bureau of the Federal Government. Industry experts volunteer their time to SCORE, and these individuals will help you.

I watched tons of YouTube Videos. I like Gary Vee and Alex Hormozi for social media marketing.

I read the book  Lead G2: Getting Prospects to Raise Their Hands. This is a great book that gives an overview of marketing. I read this book at least three times and use it as a reference today. They also offer marketing services, which I used for 12 months to help kick-start my marketing program. They taught me the basics of marketing and introduced me to HubSpot.