Tara Hunt: Building a DIY Marketing Platform for SMBs

Marketing can be painful for small businesses.

Marketing is important but spending money is a hard pill to swallow.

As a result, they adopt a DIY approach that often goes badly. Their marketing isn’t executed well, it’s spread too thin, and ROI is elusive.

Tara Hunt has experienced the small business marketing conundrum while running a digital marketing agency.

Work that she could have easily done as a freelancer no longer made economic sense.

“I would see these amazing startup founders and think like, Oh, I can see a path to really helping them, but you’re going to need a lot of time to be put in. We weren’t able to make it work with our structure,” Tara told me when she appeared on the Marketing Spark podcast.

But rather than walking away from marketing-hungry entrepreneurs, Tara did something different.

She and her team at Truly created a program called Phlywheel that combines DIY lessons and templates, coaching, and community.

It allows entrepreneurs to make marketing happen in the right ways without spending a lot of money.

Tara says Phylwheel has been an interesting journey.

“On the positive, non-surprise side, we actually proved our thesis a couple of times over,” she said. “There are super-engaged community members who fit that profile that we envisioned early on. The co-founder, who is in charge of business development. They come to every webinar, engage in what we call our weekly planning jam sessions, spend a lot of time in the community, listening and learning, and then dig into our knowledge center on a regular basis.”

I’m a fractional CMO for fast-growing B2B companies looking to attract and engage better prospects and grow sales. I help companies with brand positioning and strategic plans and oversee tactical execution.

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