It’s a new year, and you’re trying to figure out the best route to take your marketing as a small or mid-sized business, among all the other strategic plans you’re making and implementing right now. Let me share this with you, as you consider your options:  the longer I’ve been in business, the greater value I’ve placed on having a nice blend of internal and external resources on your marketing team.

It’s really important to be able to balance and marshal your internal and external resources out appropriately to give yourself the best opportunity to be successful in the marketplace. First, you need to understand your internal resources and their capabilities. In many small businesses, this may be the owner or founder, or even someone with a different job title than marketing (I’ve seen everything from salespeople to admins who happen to have a knack for this field). No matter their role or background, if someone has a penchant for your brand and how it should be expressed, they should command your respect.

The best part about your internal resources is that they are stewards of your brand. It’s important to them, so they will consider your brand their mission. But are they perfect? Of course, not—none of us are. Sometimes, we can have a blind spot internally, or especially in this era of constantly expanding digital marketing opportunities, we may have a skill set deficit. Regardless of the reason, I find that seeking external resources to blend in with your team can be a real difference-maker, as everyone can play to their strengths and have each other’s backs.

While your internal folks will understand your product or service better than any external person ever could, your external people often bring a missing perspective to your strategic preparation. Often, that missing voice happens to be that of your customer—as a lay person, external marketers can often more closely relate to your customer than you can. They aren’t as prone to use industry vernacular or take certain pieces of knowledge for granted. In addition to adding to your skill set firepower, your external teammates help keep you grounded.

As you can see, having a good team of internal and external marketers, and balancing their skills and perspectives accordingly, can really give you a more well-rounded view of your product or service, how it’s perceived by the public, and how you can be most successful marketing it.

Regardless of medium, strategies, and tactics, having a well-rounded team of external and internal resources really will provide you the tools as a small business to be more successful.  Don’t think you have to do it all yourself, but also, don’t think that it’s best to pitch everything over the fence to an agency while you handle the rest of the business and its needs.

From our team at Celero, best wishes for great success for you and your team in the coming year.

Somebody recently asked me what I love about working at Celero, and I thought of an answer much as you’d expect a veteran marketer to give.  Anyone and everyone in the marketing world has accepted the basic foundation of the profession as the “Four Ps.”  The concept that balancing price, product, promotion, and placement is the secret to managing your marketing mix has been marketing canon since 1960, and it’s just as relevant today.

For anyone interested in knowing what working at Celero is like, I’d like to advance that we have our own Four Ps.  The first P for me is People.  From our CEO down to our newest employee, everybody brings something special to work every day. Everyone here is committed to building a high-performance culture, where we set new standards for customer-centered innovation and our commitment to be a high-tech, high touch company. We are a diverse group of women and men, people fresh out of school and industry veterans with decades of experience, from all sorts of socio-economic backgrounds, and as my colleague Abigail Lucier has so eloquently noted, we take that diversity and unify with our sense of purpose to make our company great.

My second P is Productivity.  Our people are driven, and I love working with people who are determined to be successful and are willing to live by daily measurements of success. Those measurements could put a bad P—pressure—on us at times, but at our company, we have a highly collaborative culture. We have big goals, but only because our customers and partners have big needs to fill. At Celero, we want to become the household name for small and midsized merchants looking to grow quickly and sustainably, which is a monumental challenge as we enter year two of our existence. But here’s the rub, and it’s good: You never feel like you’re in it alone, because this team always has your back. We succeed together, and we sometimes fail together, but in all things, we produce together.

The third P of working at Celero is Passion.  We have people who seriously love what they do. We have multiple people at every level of the company who have been working in payments and fintech for decades, and they act like it’s their first day on the job. They love making a difference in the success stories of our small and medium-sized business customers.  They love making our various partner financial institutions more effective for their merchants as well. This passion isn’t just palpable at our offices across the country, it’s also contagious, and it drives you to give your best, too.  

Perhaps most exciting is our fourth P, Possibilities. A driving ethos of our team at Celero is to never accept that we’ve “arrived.” When you’re in the business of technology and working to solve problems for customers, applications and challenges will continue to evolve. Being arrogant about our success will be the first element of our failure, so we are committed to being humble and go about our work each day creating possibilities for the future, for our partners, our merchants, and our people.

I’m sure others could come up with their own ways of expressing why they love working at Celero, but the Four Ps work for me!

Abigail Lucier December 20, 2019 In the digital era, society has created what I think of as a cult of leadership. Whether it’s somebody like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk (and I could go on and on), we’re groomed to worship these super-geniuses. As I think about culture, it dawns on me that we never hear about any of the thousands of people who work for these companies. Do you really think that Steve Jobs, or his successor, Tim Cook, had or has all of the great ideas at Apple? That’s silly, but it’s also where we are as a society.

As we are celebrating Celero’s first year, I’ve found a particular aspect of our emerging culture not only noteworthy, but also something that’s actually changed how I choose to interact with my colleagues here. I’ve witnessed this dynamic on a daily basis, so I know it’s not a fad or a fluke. What I’m talking about is selfless leadership.

Many of us are taught that in order to compete and win in corporate life, we need to be a little selfish and make sure we take credit for successful outcomes. What I witness here, from leaders like Jeff Brown, Kevin Jones, and many others, is a simple sharing of the wealth or giving credit to any and all who deserve it and doing so openly.  

My job is in project management, and at a startup like Celero, those projects can be anything from overseeing an office buildout, managing an integration, or guiding a workstream. When I think about getting in the weeds of a project, the day-to-day grind, and the overall amount of calories that we’re all spending together on a project, I often pause to also think of the amount of people, intellect, and the overall amount of blood, sweat and tears that can go into every project all the way through to completion. It’s humbling to think of all the people that are involved in everything we do. And then I think about the number of times that I have heard our leaders Jeff or Kevin, or Scott Farace or Jim Harris, call out people who played pivotal roles in a project’s success.  When they give this credit, they not only do so publicly, but also never take credit themselves. For our leaders, it’s all about the team. While they are all industry veterans and actual thought leaders in payments and fintech, you’ll never see cults of leadership developing around them, because they prefer to share the success.

To me, this selfless leadership dynamic is perhaps one of the most inspiring things that I’ve witnessed since joining Celero. To see how natural it is for these guys to sit there and publicly give credit where it’s due, and to really make it a point to not stand up and say “I did it, it was me,” and to actually do the opposite of that. To not take credit for anything, to stand back and say, “I could not have done this without you, you, you, and you,” well, that’s significant.

Furthermore, the people they recognize are often those who probably think that their names would never be recognized or brought up in conversation. For me, this kind of recognition, whether fulfilled or neglected, can be what makes or breaks an employee—I firmly believe that. So being able to win as a team and to lose as a team, but to also give credit and to pat someone on the back when they have done an incredible job is incredibly noteworthy. This culture of the selfless leader is one of the driving forces behind our culture at Celero, and as we grow, our leadership will naturally expand to include many others. I am confident that this element of our culture is something that we will continue to embed in who we are and prove foundational to our success as we move forward.

Scott Farace November 20, 2019 If you’re a small business owner, there are a lot of different marketing tools that are available for you that happen to be high-performance, cost-effective, and easy to execute.  Some of these methods are tried-and-true, while others are newer and already proving to deliver.

Cause Marketing

I’ve always loved cause marketing for the reasons it helps connect you to your audience in a meaningful and impactful way. There are so many ways to get involved   in the community where you do business.

For a small business that could be anything from sponsoring a local high school fundraiser, the local relay for life event, or working with the local homeless shelter. What’s great about this marketing tool is that it enables your business to meet your customers where they live and reside, touch them close to their hearts, and in many cases, involve your entire company, too. Instead of always being salesy, you’re promoting the organizations and missions they hold dear. 

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a newer option that’s available to all business owners, no matter the size of your business, due to the democratizing effect of technology. You can find options at any price point

Once you define your target segments, you can set a realistic budget, test messages and different delivery techniques like pay-per-click advertising and banner ads, and track your results to see what resonates with your target audience.

Content Marketing

Using content marketing to express your brand and value proposition is now essential for businesses of all sizes. When you’re able to have the right content, whether it’s a blog, a podcast, a white paper, or short video, you’ll be able to find out quickly what resonates with your audience.

Best of all, today’s digital world provides you with low-cost ways to distribute this wide spectrum of content, whether it’s through an optimized website, PR distribution engine, and especially social media. Social media is the optimal no-to-low cost  (by boosting posts or promoting tweets, for example) vehicle  to  deliver content to a very homed-in  target audience.

At Celero, we enjoy helping small and mid-sized businesses, the backbone of the American economy, compete and win. I’ve been there myself, running my own boutique agency for several years, and I know the pressures that small business owners face. I’m always happy to share any experience or expertise that might help relieve those pressures and foster growth!

Scott Farace October 28, 2019 For small business owners just beginning their marketing journey, setting your company’s brand apart should be the number-one priority. In nearly three decades of strategic marketing for businesses and nonprofits of various sizes, I’ve seen day-in and day-out the importance of developing a unique and consistent brand message to connect authentically with audiences. A strong brand can drive growth and it starts with determining your business’ point of difference.

Starting out, building your brand will take some analysis of where your company stands and its biggest strengths. It’s crucial to ask yourself, “What makes my business special or different in the market? What makes it the best of its kind?” After homing in on that factor, your next step is to expound upon it to create a brand message. Then, you can circulate that message to your entire organization from sales to customer service, and product teams. It’s vital that the message be cohesive across all corners of the organization for brand consistency. And even if you’re a solo entrepreneur, branding yourself can pay huge dividends early on. When people can tell you take yourself and your business seriously, they’ll respect you for the professional you are.

Once everyone in your organization is familiar with your brand message, you can begin conveying it across various marketing tools. Utilize digital marketing, social media marketing, and traditional marketing methods to reach the widest possible target audience on a daily basis. The more prospective customers you reach, the better. And once again, I can’t stress enough how important it is for your messaging to be consistent and fully integrated, across your sales materials, product sheets, websites, direct mail programs, and anywhere else you talk about yourself.

If you’re not sure where to allocate marketing funds early on, you can make things simple. Think about where you touch the most customers, and then work backwards from there. Whether that means your staff, your website, your store, or your team members who are out visiting people, you should always play to your strengths so you can sharpen them. Just keep it simple, and then build as you go along. 

Focus on those touchpoints where you already have strong audiences who are likely to be loyal to your brand. If your website gets the most visitors, allocate dollars toward web design. If a particular team interacts with the most customers, put in the time to train them on speaking to that brand message. That way, regardless of whether you’ve got a dollar or ten million dollars to spend, you can focus on getting the most out of it with the most effective possible use of your marketing dollars.

These steps will help set your business apart by creating a cohesive, distinctive brand to build loyalty, which will in turn boost revenue. If you follow this path, there’s no telling how far your business’ success will take you. Just focus, keep it simple, and execute. While the rewards of branding aren’t often immediate, you’ll be surprised by how quickly you do see results.