What are your aspirations?

Running a business is hard work.  It doesn’t matter if you’re just getting started with a clean sheet, are struggling to gain traction or you’ve cracked it and have a thriving business – you can’t afford to pin your hopes on ‘luck’.

If I could only recommend one book to read to anyone starting or running a small business it would be Michael Gerber’s The EMyth Revisited.  It’s full of excellent and straightforward advice and good common sense.

When you’re enmeshed in the day-to-day running of a business, it’s easy to forget to look at the big picture and your goals and aspirations for your business frequently get lost.

All the management gurus will tell you to have a vision of where you want to be in one year, three years, five years, ten years, etc.  If you’ve been on a business course you’ve probably done some rough ideas of what those visions look like, but it’s hard to look into the future and see things clearly when you are doing an exercise for 20 minutes.  I’m going to suggest something a bit more practical.

Take some time away from work and spend some of it dreaming and the rest turning those dreams into a plan.

Why do you need to be away from work?  Two reasons – firstly, you don’t want to be interrupted and secondly, you need to get into a different head space.  It’s difficult to dream when you can see an overflowing inbox.

Your dream will start by looking at what you’d like your life to be like this time next year.  What will need to happen in your business to allow you to have that?  This might sound very personal, but if it’s your business your personal goals matter as much as the business goals.

Write down what you want to be, do and have.  This goals strategy might be a useful tool.

Then repeat this for a time further into the future – three or five years.

What is your end goal for your business?  Do you intend to keep it until you retire?  Then what?  Will you close it or sell it or put in a manager and keep it?  Let your imagination fill in all the details until it feels real.

If you intend to grow it to sell or to float on the stock market, what is your target date for that?  Let yourself dream about what that will be like. 

With these visions clear, it will be much easier to work out how you achieved these outcomes.

Block out at least half a day every three months

Treat this as though you’ve made a commitment to your most important client – because you have – yourself!

Put it in your diary and don’t accept any appointments for that time.

Choose your location carefully

You might have an office environment that allows you to go somewhere and be undisturbed, but if not go somewhere else.  I know people who go somewhere rural and gaze at the landscape or simply walk and others who take themselves to a corner of their favourite coffee shop.  You might have a local library or a hotel where you can tuck yourself into a corner – or you may simply stay at home if everyone else is out at work or school.  I know people who literally go away and stay in a hotel for a day or two to work on their business goals.

Equip yourself before you settle in

For the dreaming part you won’t need much except your imagination – and maybe your favourite tea or coffee.

For the planning part you’ll need either a laptop or lots of scrap paper and coloured markers.

For each big goal, create a to do list with actions, responsibilities and deadlines.  You’re building your business’s operating plan for the future.

Why do this every three months?

Every plan needs to be reviewed.  Circumstances change and people come and go.  Opportunities arise you hadn’t foreseen, legislation changes and the world evolves.  You need to ensure your goals are still going where you want them to. 

You change too – your aspirations for the future may need to be reassessed and accommodated.

How do you reach your audience?

 

If you read my blogs regularly, you’ll know that I bang on about ideal client profiles – and, at the risk of boring the pants off you, knowing who you’re trying to reach is essential to every marketing activity you do.

If you know your audience, reaching them becomes so much easier.  You know where they are active, what they read, what they watch and what their problems are.  That allows you to tick all their boxes and be the obvious choice when they know they need your kind of help.

So let’s look at your options.

Social media

It’s no coincidence that people who are successful on social media are known as influencers.  It’s a way to put you in front of people and impress them with your knowledge and shared expertise, your authority in your industry and your willingness to help others.  A carefully crafted campaign on the platform where your target audience hang out can be powerful.

It’s probably not a resource to be your only marketing, but it should not be ignored.

Broadcast and print media

Getting your name and your business into the media is a great way to become visible and to get known as an expert.  However, you need to be sure that you’re choosing the right media – the ones that your ideal clients are following. 

If your audience are reading their industry journals, appearing in a national daily may not be very effective.  If you’re on local radio in the daytime when they’re not listening, it won’t help your marketing.

Advertising

Ads are a whole article of their own!  They can be cheap and cheerful or quite expensive, so working your budget out first is essential.  There are plenty of publications who will offer you a deal to get you to place an ad, but is your audience reading these ads. 

A £50 ad in a local magazine delivered door-to-door can work brilliantly for an electrician or a company that cleans gutters, but won’t work for a company that makes parts for car manufacturers.  So pick your publication carefully – and then invest in getting a professional to design your ad, so it’s attractive and clear.

Don’t fall into the trap of trying to stuff as much information as possible into a relatively small space.  The headline is the key to success – get that right and it will engage with your audience.  Make it easy for them to contact you.

Advertising can include TV, billboards, banners, sports sponsorship and more.  Think carefully about how advertising fits into your marketing campaign.

Direct marketing

This includes leaflets of all kinds whether they’re delivered by post or by hand.  Effectively they’re an ad that you can deliver directly to your target audience.

The same applies to leaflets as to ads – don’t stuff them with too much information.  Paper leaflets are better printed on one-side, or with the minimum of information on the reverse (maybe just your contact info). 

Cards are better, these can be postcard size or bigger, and are harder for people to screw up and throw away, so are often kept around for longer.  You can put information onto both sides and the formats can be double sides or a folded document that has more substance.

Direct marketing also includes what is often known as ‘lumpy mail’.  Sending something in an envelope that creates a lump, is more likely to get opened – curiosity is a powerful thing!

People include branded items, like pans and coasters, but I’ve seen successful lumpy mail campaigns with teabags, biscuits, etc. and a clever message.

Email marketing

This can be very effective if you’re good at writing good subject lines to get the recipient to open the email and creating content that grabs their attention quickly.

Don’t try and send lots of email like this from your own email account, that’s the quickest way to get your email provider to shut your account down.  Instead use an online emarketing platform like Mailchimp, Aweber, Mailerlite or Constant Contact (there are dozens, do a bit of research).

An integrated campaign

You don’t have to choose one or another.  You can use more than one method to reach your target market, but you do need a strategy and a plan of action to ensure your chosen methods are congruent and successful.

Make marketing work

If you’re running a small business marketing is essential, but it’s also one of the things that gets pushed down the to-do list when you get busy.  If you don’t maintain visibility and keep ‘restuffing the sausage machine’, you’ll find your business suffers from feast and famine.

But when you’re time-poor, how do you keep up consistent marketing?

You have four options:

1. Don’t do any marketing when you’re busy
2. Have a plan, with a pared-down version for when you’re busy
3. Do your marketing at midnight, because that’s the only time you have available
4. Outsource it

Option 1 creates more challenges than it solves.  If you don’t keep the marketing machine running it’s likely that you’ll face an uphill struggle every time you restart your marketing efforts – and that’s not good business.  You’re pretty much reinventing the wheel!

Option 2 is a good idea.  Having a system is essential and, if you think about it, you can create something that is easy to run and can be pared down to reduce the amount of time required to keep it going – while still maintaining your visibility.

Option 3 is a recipe for burnout.  It may not be realistic to work on your business during normal business hours only, but don’t make it any harder than it needs to be.

Option 4 is solution that will definitely work – but you can’t abdicate all responsibility.  Working with an external marketer offers lots of benefits, but you will need to work with them.

So, you’ve got two viable options that are good for you and your business.  Regardless of which route you choose, you’ll need a marketing plan.

A good marketing plan

This isn’t a social media schedule or a monthly newsletter.  A good marketing plan needs time and thought to be invested, and once it’s created, it will make life a lot easier.

The core elements are:

• Your ideal customer avatar:  their problems, pains, goals and barriers to overcome.
• How you can help:  what problems can you solve for them?  What benefits will they experience from working with you?
• Where will you find people who match your avatar?  This might be an online forum or an industry association meeting, explore where these people hang out, both actually and digitally.
• What are the tools available to you to reach your ideal customer?  These might include social media, blogs, webinars, direct sales, email campaigns, networking, video, podcasts, the list is long!  Choose the ones that will work best for your target audience, don’t try to do everything.
• Who will be responsible for generating and posting content, attending networking events, etc.?  
• Measurement and review:  How will you measure success?  How often will you review your plan and tweak it when needed?

Systems make life easier

Having systems in place will make everything run more smoothly.  For instance a social media schedule that has a theme for each week with types of post e.g. opinion for LinkedIn, tip for Facebook, graphic with a question for Instagram – and so on.  Having a trigger and a subject makes content generation much easier.

If you use a design tool like Canva for creating your social media posts, developing a smart template or two that just need images and words adding will also improve your time management.  You can use your brand colours and produce a professional result with the minimum of effort.

If you write a blog article, take quotes from it for social media and use it to lead your newsletter – don’t reinvent the wheel!

If you are running your own marketing, you’ll need to decide what the bare minimum is.  

For instance:

• Instead of posting three social media posts every week, maybe one post a week will ensure your social accounts don’t have tumbleweed blowing through.
• Instead of writing two blogs a month, create one short article with a great piece of advice.
• Instead of posting a video every week on YouTube, create a single longer video, then use AI to clip it into short posts for social media.  A 20-minute video can create 30+ social posts in the click of a button.

If you choose to work with an agency, they should be able to keep generating content for you.  You’ll still need to make the time to review the posts, articles, etc. and have regular discussions to ensure they know what’s going on in your business and can contribute useful ideas for your ongoing marketing.