Is Your Marketing Platform Holding You Back from Growth?
- Many small businesses unknowingly stall growth by relying on outdated or fragmented marketing tools—issues like poor integration, hard-to-use reporting, and lack of automation cause inefficiencies and missed opportunities.
- The right marketing platform should unify your digital efforts, making it easier to reach, engage, and retain customers with tools like campaign automation, centralized dashboards, and local SEO built in.
- Surefire Local’s all-in-one marketing platform empowers service businesses to grow faster and smarter by simplifying marketing, revealing performance insights, and eliminating time-wasting workarounds.
It doesn’t matter what type of business you’re running or even the industry that you’re operating in – growth should always be one of your top priorities.
Your future success will depend on the decisions that you’re making today, and those decisions need to be made with an eye towards growing from the business you’re currently running to the one you always hoped you’d be in charge of five or even ten years from now.
Having said that, growth, in and of itself, is not the answer. It’s actually something that a lot of small business owners, and especially those who have never been an entrepreneur before, struggle with. According to one recent study, there are over 33 million small businesses in the United States. To put that into perspective, that represents about 99.9% of the entire country’s economy.
However, approximately 20% of those small businesses will fail within their first year. Roughly half of them will close within just five years. It may seem contradictory, but it’s true – the longer a business operates, the more likely it is to fail. About 65% fail right around the 10-year mark, according to the same research outlined above.
You might think that this is a matter of businesses that are simply unable to grow at all. But there’s a lot of research that indicates that growing too quickly is just as bad as not growing at all. Both scenarios lead to cash flow problems, which could prove deadly if you’re not able to find your way out of it.
If this is the type of situation you find yourself in, and you’re feeling like your business’ growth has stalled, there may be an unlikely culprit worth examining: your marketing platform.
How Marketing Impacts Growth
If your growth has stalled and you’re growing too slowly, poor marketing and/or sales strategies could be to blame. Simply put, you’re not reaching and acquiring the customers you need to survive – resulting in low revenue and, at the end of the day, failure.
Directly tied into this is the concept of poor market research. Many of the businesses that fail do so because they don’t accurately assess the market demand for their product or service. Sometimes, this leads to a seemingly permanent lack of customers – which is the case if you’re not growing fast enough.
Or, it could be that you accidentally became a flash in the pan, so to speak. You tapped into a large audience immediately, but failed to expand beyond that, and when that audience disappeared, you weren’t able to easily pivot to a new one.
Regardless, the right marketing platform should allow you to avoid these types of situations altogether. From a 10,000-foot view, it should give you the insight you need into how you’re reaching people, who you’re reaching, and how to keep them coming back for more. If you feel like you’re not able to evolve with your audience, growth is going to suffer – truly, it doesn’t get much more straightforward than that.
Never forget that most of your growth potential (and indeed, your revenue) will come not from new customers, but from existing and repeat ones. The exact numbers will change depending on the industry you’re in, but this will always be true.
If you’re currently using a marketing platform that doesn’t make it easy to engage and re-engage with exactly these types of people, make no mistake: you need to be using another marketing platform.
The Major Signs That Your Marketing Platform Is Harming Growth
To be absolutely clear: if your growth has stalled, it’s likely that you have other problems beyond a simple fix like getting a new marketing platform. Your communications, at their core, could be the issue. There could be fundamental issues with your business model that are slowly beginning to reveal themselves. All that is to say, switching to a new marketing platform isn’t guaranteed to be the silver bullet you’ve been looking for to turn everything around.
However, it will be a big first step – and it can be the change you need to begin to course correct everything else. It’s a bit like getting the oil changed in your car and it suddenly runs as good as new again. You still need to make sure the car winds up in the right place, but you’ve taken a big step towards making that happen.
So how do you know when it’s time to re-evaluate your marketing platform? The answer, as is so often true in these types of situations, is “it depends.”
Start by looking at how your team works day-to-day. If you’re constantly switching between apps just to engage with your customers, that’s a sign your tools aren’t integrated well. If generating a performance report takes hours – or if you avoid doing it altogether – it might be time for a system that makes data easier to understand.
Another common issue is scalability. Maybe your contact list has grown, but your platform can’t keep up with segmentation or personalization. Or perhaps you’ve added a sales tool that doesn’t sync properly with your marketing data. These small inefficiencies add up – and over time, they become a real barrier to growth.
Remember that every minute you’re dealing with a time-consuming “work around” or “temporary fix” is a minute that your attention isn’t focused on something far more important.
Even worse, when your platform doesn’t adapt as your business evolves, you end up spending more time managing the tool than actually marketing your business.
To truly dive deep and confirm that this is one of the major barriers that you’ve been dealing with, begin by asking yourself a few honest questions.
Where does your team spend most of its time? Is it on creative strategy and customer engagement… or troubleshooting technical issues? Are you able to measure results easily and make data-driven decisions? Or are you relying on gut instinct because your reports are hard to access or interpret?
As you start to answer questions like these, you begin to get a sense of where your issues truly are.
It can help to list out the key features you truly need at your current stage of growth. For example, if you’re nurturing leads via email, does your platform offer automation tools that trigger messages based on behavior? If you’re running multiple campaigns, can you manage them from one place – or are you cobbling everything together from separate systems?
Once you know what’s missing or what’s too complex for your needs, you’re in a better position to decide whether to optimize what you have or consider a new solution.
What a Marketing Platform SHOULD Enable for Your Business
In a lot of ways, marketing automation was supposed to make your job easier. Why, then, does it constantly feel like more work is being added to your day all the time? One of the reasons why the wrong platform is hurting your growth is that most teams just limp along, stuck with platforms that were never built for what their day-to-day reality actually looks like.
Having the right marketing platform at your side will instantly feel like the opposite of that – and that’s what Surefire Local is all about.
Surefire Local puts all your digital marketing tools under one roof. You can publish social posts, launch ads, optimize your website and listings, manage reviews, and even text or email customers – all without jumping between tabs. This “all-in-one” approach saves time and eliminates the friction that often stalls growth.
Data and clarity are built into the very DNA of Surefire Loca. You get dashboard-level visibility into every campaign’s return on investment – there is no guesswork, no digging, and no more operating on little more than “gut instinct.” The platform highlights where leads are coming from, which channels are converting, and what’s costing you too much. That means smarter decisions at the speed of business.
Local SEO, Google Business Profile, and business listing optimization across 70+ directories are handled automatically, too. Consistent information, fresh content, and higher rankings all feed into more traffic and leads. Thankfully, you don’t have to rely on an expensive army of third-party professionals (or take on a second full-time job to handle it yourself) in order to do it.
In short, Surefire Local isn’t just a marketing platform – it’s a growth engine. By unifying marketing activities, automating everyday tasks, and delivering clear performance insights, it empowers business owners to stop stalling and start growing.
At the end of the day, your marketing platform should support your goals, not create obstacles that get in the way of your success. If your business has evolved, your technology should evolve with it. The right platform won’t just help you market more efficiently – it will empower you to grow smarter, faster, and with less stress.
Don’t let outdated tools dictate your pace. Reclaim your momentum by making sure your technology is keeping up with your ambition.
If you’d like to find out more information about whether your marketing platform is stalling growth, or if you have any additional questions that you’d like to go over with someone in a bit more detail, please don’t hesitate to contact us today. You can also click here to attend a Surefire Local demo to get a sense of how this all-in-one marketing platform can truly start to solve a lot of the growth-related issues outlined above.