My Strategy for Easy & Efficient DIY Small Biz Marketing

Many of us struggle to dedicate time & money to marketing our small business, particularly when we’re regional business owners and we’re wearing all the hats:

• It’s not directly making us money

• We see it as a ‘nice to have’ not a ‘need to have’

• We’re all closet perfectionists and want it done ‘right’, but this generally means hours of Googling that gets us nowhere

• When we do finally commit some time to it, we don’t have any measurable outcomes to track our progress, and so it all feels wasted. 

Sound familiar?

Here, I want to introduce to you the single key mindset shift you need to make that will take you from ‘I’ll get to it after I’ve done these bajillion other things’ to actually dedicating time to it with confidence and discipline. No more guilt, no more fluffing around - just focus. 

Guess what: marketing is actually a lot like going to the gym. 

I have been using this expression WAAAY longer than I’ve actually been going to the gym! But I can completely relate to the mindset required for signing up to a gym to get a result:

• You have a clear LONG TERM goal in mind

• You’re getting a professional to put together a strategy that you’ll follow, trusting the process

• You’ll be tracking you progress along the way to measure success

Marketing is about regular repeatable actions that you commit to performing in order to see long term results. It is NOT about making a whole bunch of sales off the back of an Instagram post. It is about the regular emails, Facebook posts, Instagram stories, videos, radio ads - whatever you’re investing in, it’s about the consistency of showing up, offering value and giving potential customers a glimpse of what they stand to gain by working with you. 

It’s also about following a big-picture strategy that’s built around getting a result - in this case, getting those most likely to do business with you to go from potential customers to paying customers. You then turn that strategy into a series of practical steps you’ll take along the way. 

And you have a way of measuring success as you go, so you know you’re on the right track. Marketing should also be implemented with a measuring stick in mind - but more on that later. 

In the same way, you could also think about marketing like farming: farmers will prepare soil, plant crops, nurture them, then harvest & sell over a long period of time. They take the steps in the beginning following a formula, and then they trust that process to pay off long term. Afterwards, they’ll analyse and tweak the system for the next cycle.

In marketing, the systems you implement now will take anywhere from 3 - 12 months to pay off. You may have quick wins along the way, but ultimately there are no silver bullets to sustained success. Only daily, consistent actions. They don’t have to be expensive, complicated or time consuming - they just have to be consistent. 

So how do you market consistently without being stuck to your screen?

I cover the topic of content batching more in this article, but the best way to make your marketing consistent is:

• Start with a core piece of content - a blog, a video or audio about a topic that relates to an area that your customers are struggling with, want to do better in, or need to know in order to achieve their goals. Just like this blog!

• Publish that core piece of content on your website. 

• Extract key ‘nuggets of gold’ from that content. You can turn these into text-based quotes, or captions that accompany an image. The captions for these posts should be self-contained in value, but should direct your audience back to your website so they can find out more (scroll back through my Instagram feed to see how I did it)

• Map these out over a period of time, trying to post at least 3 times a week - this still allows space for anything that comes up in the moment worth sharing too, but is still consistent enough for your audience. 

• If you start with one piece of content for a 4 week cycle, that’s only 12 posts you have to create around your topic. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem so daunting, does it?

• Then you can schedule as much content as possible in advance - you can use a scheduler tool like Later or even just a calendar app with notes & reminders. 

• If you can’t create 12 ‘nuggets of gold’ from your core piece of content, fill in the gaps with client success stories, before and after photos, videos answering frequently asked questions - be creative on how you address the topic. 

After the 4 weeks is over, analyse your results and see if you can improve. Did some content do better than others? Could you write about a different topic next time? Or could you dive deeper into a more specific area? Could you post more?

The most important thing is to just start! Once you start, you have something to track, measure and improve. 

Want to get started?

I have a FREE marketing content planner in my Resources section - it’s full of thought-starters for your marketing content so you can get the ball rolling. Click here to grab your copy!