I am guilty of it – most small business owners are – too many ideas – not enough time!
Especially when it comes to marketing. There are so many ways to market your business – especially online – and there are so many people telling how you their idea is the best.
My inbox is full of organisations selling me their secret formula. Everything from email campaigns to LinkedIn secrets.
If I listened to everyone – the marketing areas I should be focused on include:
- Regular blog posts (doing it now!)
- Newsletters
- Email campaigns
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Youtube videos
- More instagram
- LinkedIn articles
- Constantly tweeting
- Running ads on Facebook
- Facebook stories
- Networking
- Etc.
- Etc.
But as a solopreneur I don’t have the time to do all of these things and to do them well.
What I need to spend my time on is first working out what works best for my business to get my ideal customers into my sales pipeline.
You may have signed up to many of the free webinars and then put up with being bombarded by sales emails. But it is important to remember that no business is the same as yours so your marketing plan needs to be unique to you.
And sometimes that means you have to trial a range of tools to see what works best for your business.
I have moved to the country, so I need to reestablish myself as an expert in facilitating change. But where is the best place to start? What are the best tools to use?
I need to look at the tools my target market respond to and build campaigns in these platforms one at a time to review their effectiveness in creating sales.
I need to trial and measure trial and measure and trial…
Now this may sound like a long-term plan and – like many of you I suffer hurry sickness – but it is the most effective way for marketing success.
You might make mistakes, but you will learn and develop an effective marketing program that will work for you in the long term to grow a loyal customer base.
X + Y = you
There is a lot of wishful thinking attached to being an SME. Wondering if you should be doing more of this, less of that, feeling a little envious, wanting more hours in the day – wishing you could afford a PA (or knowing how to get one), finding the miracle quick fix.
The number of things we could do is overwhelming.
The to do list is endless.
My challenge to you is to make your to do list – the tah dah list – and keep it short and sweet.
We all have lots of ideas and people feeding us information about more good ideas! This can sometimes result in feeling paralysed and we end up doing nothing or a little bit of everything!
So start by deciding what to do first. Ignore the temptation of believing you should be using every tactic and platform that everyone else is using right now.
These tactics may be right for you – or not – but you cannot do them all.
Just like customers – 80% of your results might come from 20% of your work.
Instead of doing it all – pick one thing you are confident will produce some results and do it well. Measure it. And then try other small experiments – one at a time – until you hit upon a winning formula.
A winning formula is one that drives revenue into your business and one that you can do over again.
Then, you systematise it or outsource it before you start to explore new opportunities for growth.
What is the one marketing tool you will chose to use first?