When it comes to marketing your small business, nothing ever seems simple. There are so many options – so many platforms, so many tools, so many tactics to try out… I mean, how are we supposed to know where to focus in order to get the results, if we don’t have an entire lifetime to devote to this stuff?
(Don’t worry, that’s a rhetorical question. I’m going to tell you right now)
Start by getting clear on what you actually want to get from all this effort.
Don’t just say you want to sell more stuff, or get more followers, or build your email list – be SPECIFIC.
Do you want to sell 10 coaching packages in the next 3 months?
Do you want to increase your Instagram following to 10,000 so you can have the “swipe up” feature?
Do you want to welcome 3,000 people onto your email list by the end of the year?
Do you want to secure 2 brand sponsorships by the end of the month?
Get insanely clear and be insanely specific so that you:
- Can properly focus every single marketing activity to get your closer to the goal
- Measure your success after all the hard work
Pick your power platform
I want you to pay attention to this part – you do NOT have to be on every single platform. In fact, it would be much more impactful if you get way selective and choose just one, or maybe two, platforms where:
- You actually enjoy spending your time (because sanity is important)
- Your target people hang out
To be quite blunt, if you spread your attention too thinly, your marketing just won’t be effective.
Narrow down your format focus
Again, you don’t have to win at all the content formats. You don’t have to be a lover of live streams, a brilliant blogger, a podcasting pro, a video vixen AND one of the Instagram intelligentsia.
You could, you know, just pick one.
My top (often unsolicited) tip for choosing your core content format is to think about what you love to consume. Do you watch a lot of video? Do you love listening to audios on the go? Are you a big reader? Let your personal tastes guide the way.
Tweak your toolkit
You do not have to buy all of the shiny digital marketing tools out there, but I would recommend building up a handy little toolkit that make it quicker for you to show up and market your business with ease.
For example, in my toolkit I have:
- Canva, for creating templates for all my visuals
- Planoly, for scheduling posts and Stories to Instagram
- Repurpose.io, for transforming all of my podcasts into videos and adding them to my Youtube channel
I also like to make use of the handy hacks that are available on my platforms of choice, such as:
- Facebook’s inbuilt scheduler, so I can easily schedule posts to my Facebook group in one sitting
- IGTV’s share switch, so I can cross-post each video to Facebook with a tap of a button, and add them to my Instagram Stories too
Switch off all the voices
This one can be a little tricky because the FOMO struggle is real… try disconnecting from all those many different sources of information that are currently flooding your brain with “shoulds”.
Be discerning. Pick one or two experts to follow and learn from. You can always switch it up later, but nobody can take in all of those competing voices and stay sane.
I have two experts I always go back to whenever I need a bit of digital marketing inspiration/know-how:
- Alex Beadon, Queen of Instagram Stories and purposeful personal brand creation (which you can learn more about here)
- Sarah Morgan, who offers no bullshit blog and list-building strategy for the daring and driven
There you have it – an overview of how to market your business with ease:
- Get clear with what you want to achieve.
- Stop trying to build a presence on every single platform.
- Focus on perfecting one core content format.
- Use handy tools to make everything more effortless
- Stop listening to EVERYONE
