How to maximise your marketing efforts for small business success
You love what you do. If pure passion equaled the number of customers or clients on your books, you’d be sold out and over capacity. Unfortunately, running a successful small business doesn’t always quite work that way. Making sales consistently requires that you harness your passion to effectively market your goods and services so your ideal customers see your value and are ready to buy.
Easier said than done! You’ve got to the point in business when you’re a little fed up with marketing (putting it nicely). You’ve done everything you’re supposed to do and it still feels like you’re shouting into the void.
Sound familiar?
It’s time to find your vibe when it comes to marketing so you can move forward in your business with confidence, conviction and money hitting your bank account.
Two Major Blockers To Maximum Marketing Results
Firstly, why does it feel so hard? As business owners (alongside all the other roles we juggle like mums, partners and children of ageing parents), we don’t have unlimited time. The ideal situation is to get the maximum results in the shortest time possible. However, marketing often remains a massive drain on time and energy without providing worthwhile results. What’s going wrong could fall into the categories of these two big blockers.
Trying to do it all
When you don’t know what’s going to work for your business but you desperately want to make it work, you may come to the conclusion that you’ll just do it all. Something will have to work, right? From personal experience, I can tell you that it’s not fun to throw spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks. It was so overwhelming (as if life isn’t overwhelming enough!) and that made it harder to generate results from marketing.
Cherry-picking your favourites
On the other hand, when whittling down the marketing techniques you engage in, it doesn’t always make sense to just pick what you like. Of course, your enjoyment of what you do in your business matters. You want your business to be personally fulfilling as well as financially fulfilling. But it’s helpful to have a think about what marketing methods will get you the best results so that you can actually generate positive business outcomes from your marketing efforts.
Ideally let's avoid falling into either extreme because neither generates maximum results for your business. So how do you find the happy medium? I’ve got a combination of journaling techniques for you to try!
Journaling Techniques: Brainstorming & Lists
There’s more than one way to market a business. When you find the way that works for you, you get one step closer to creating the business and life of your dreams. It’s best not to put all your eggs in one basket so pick a few marketing methods that make it easier for your ideal client to find you, connect with you and decide to work with you. The marketing combination you choose is down to you, your business and your ideal client. Here’s how to figure it out.
Step #1
Start by brainstorming all the ways you could market your business. Think outside the box of the marketing methods you’ve used before and the marketing methods you’ve been told to use. Everything and anything makes the cut. Don’t leave anything out, even if you’d never do it, as it could trigger other ideas that you do use.
Step #2
Once you’ve exhausted all the possibilities of how you could market your business, sort through all the techniques you’ve come up with in your brainstorming session. First, list them on a scale of easiest to hardest. This is completely based on your perspective. Some people love writing so will thrive creating blogs. Other people are more visually creative so social media is their arena.
Step #3
Next list your marketing ideas based on how effective they are. Look at your own metrics. How are different marketing methods resonating with your audience? If you don’t have any metrics of your own, research the average conversion rates for your industry. Consider the time and effort you have to put in to get a single conversion. Be honest about the realistic effectiveness of each marketing technique.
Step #4
Highlight the happy mediums. These are the techniques that have the best balance between ease and effectiveness. Maybe you’ll be lucky and have a couple of super easy and super effective marketing methods. More likely, you’ll have to compromise a bit but it will be worth putting in the effort when you know the effectiveness of the marketing method.
Step #5
Now you can make informed decisions about your marketing activities. What are you keeping, what are you introducing and what are you pausing? This could help you to recognise easy techniques you always go for but don’t get you the best return for your time and effort as well as the harder ones you’re avoiding that actually work really well.
Raise Your Awareness. Raise Your Effectiveness.
The purpose of combining the brainstorming and list journaling techniques (as well as a lot of other journaling techniques) is to raise your awareness. When you are aware of the effectiveness of your marketing and why you’re doing those activities, you can make informed decisions about moving forward. Are you doing it because you think you should or because it’s the best way for you to grow your business?
You see, I’ve found on my business journey that it can be the smaller adjustments that make the biggest difference to my growth. So by being aware of what you’re doing (or not doing), the results of that action, and your reasoning behind it, you can build the business you want to run and create the life you want to live.
I share loads of other journaling techniques for raising your awareness and coach you through how to take action on what you discover inside the Find Your Vibe Business Club. Join our group of passionate women in business who are willing to look inwards and face their strengths, weaknesses, limiting beliefs and valuable skills so that they can show up as their best selves in their business and make external progress such as more sales and more money.
