How to do your own marketing

As a business owner you are often tasked with big challenges and tough questions to answer, but in terms of not being happy about your level of marketing, you need to ask yourself some really important questions and go with your instincts upon answering, don’t doubt yourself and say these questions out loud and please write your answers down.

Question 1 – Why is my marketing shit? Time or money or lack of knowing what to do?

Question 2 – Is my business brand separated from me?

Question 3 – Do I have the time and ability to improve the level of marketing from ‘shit’ to ‘not bad actually’?

Question 4 – Do I promise to make the commitment to myself and my business to make an amends here?

Write down your answers now before reading on please. 

Some initial ideas and thoughts about your answers/ possible answers I invisage: 

Answer 1- Time? Block time in your diary, two spots per week, even just 2 x 30 mins – it’s nothing right? To make a plan and start. If it feels unachievable, use that time to ask for help. Internally or externally from your business. 

If you answered money- lots you can do marketing for free, trade favours/ services with other service providers too. Not knowing what to do- use your 30 min slots to order books, listen to podcasts or watch YouTube videos.

Answer 2- Lots of businesses and owners are intermingled. The TOV of the business is often the owner’s TOV, and that’s ok, but trying to separate the two will help. Each should have slightly different values and the business should represent more than the founder. Try the exercise of writing down your personal brand values or brand archetype and your businesses. Stick them on the wall behind your screen and ruminate. See if they’re right. Start drafting your unique proposition for your business. Do it 10 times over the next 2 weeks.

Answer 3- Again, look at your team and network, do they have the passion for it? Do you?

Answer 4- I hope you answered yes as you’ve read my post thus far!

Right so you’ve gone through four Q&As but now what? Here’s some headlines of options you may have: 

• How to hire the right marketing agency for your business

I’m sure this topic is well covered but I wanted to write up my short sharp tips as I’ve been on the hiring/ client side and then agency side, and I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly!

1 – Write a clear brief including what are your objectives as an entire business? It is their job to tailor their services and deliver results that work towards your business’ goals.

2 – Ask to see testimonials or read reviews. It’s so important to read what others’ experience has been and what specifically they delivered vs what they’re going to possibly deliver for you. Sometimes an agency may be biting off more than they can chew so just, check!

3- Ask to see contracts and check the Ts and Cs.

4- Personality and cultural fit – the agency needs to give your business what you’re missing, but the personality and chemistry needs to work and you need to have a partnership where the marketing agency are bringing out the best in your business and they are allowed to deliver what you’ve asked for.

5- Check their marketing – do they have a breadth of clients, speak to your sector and look like a good representation of your brand?

6- Checking-in process and feedback loops – set out parameters or timeline that works for both of you. The agency are relying on your feedback timings for their workload as well as your deliverables needing to land around your business’s needs. It’s a two way street that needs open channels of communication.

• Getting to grips with your brand values – what are they?

Cast your mind into why you set up the business and what ultimately matters in the world your business evolves in.

How do your customers see you and your competition?

Why do you stand out?

What makes you different?

And what differentiating factor do you want to be known for?

Answering these, and your part-way there.

You can also look into other companies brand values, do some competitor research, look at brand archetypes or brand personalities… and from knowing the answers to the questions above- we can then move onto identifying your unique business proposition.

Knowing this AND your brand values, informs your brand strategy and helps you sell yourself in a pitch and on your website with conviction. 

• Tools to do your own marketing 

If you’ve followed my four previous posts, you will have now hopefully had a good analysis of where you’re at and where might be the best place to get yourself started. As well, hopefully you have started to make time to do your own marketing or learning about marketing, thrashed out your brand values, googled brand archetypes, drafted some unique propositions and you know what to do if you were to hire your own marketing agency. If you have done some of these steps – that is f-ing brilliant and ask peers and your team for their thoughts too.

Now, it’s time for the time and productivity hacks. Social Media Scheduling!!! ARGH. SEO Analysis of your site? Google Analytics? A tool for managing your marketing tasks? There’s Buffer and Later, they’re the main ones for socials at the moment, Buffer has a free version and Later’s cheapest product is $18 per month. For SEO, I like SEM Rush to check my site and see how effective it’s being. There’s plugins too for your site which can help with analytics and SEO. Sorry if this is getting to techy!

Moving on, project management tools! I’m currently trying Click Up and I like it a lot, I just need to spend more time learning the hacks and to get the most out of it!

Other analytics bits and bobs I’ve covered before, see link in the comments for a recent blog.

The world of hacks and tools for assistance with your marketing is vast but hopefully this is a good start here! 

Get in touch to find out more about our ideas or methods.