I’ve created a short series of audios which answer questions I have been asked from people who have creative minds and a lot of ideas.
Episode 5 – I need to change my marketing approach – where do I start?
You can find them on Substack.
Transcript
I’ve realised that social media is no longer the most effective place for me to market my business because my audience has changed, but I’m struggling to figure out where to start with changing my approach.
So this is a question I was asked by a specific person recently. And the first thing I’d say is that marketing is a big topic. There’s a lot to it. um but as you say social media is not always the best place to reach some audiences so in this particular case this person has changed their audience and that’s why they’re reassessing where they where they’re doing their marketing.
So the place I’d start with this is with some with laying everything out to get some clarity. So writing some stuff down on a large sheet of blank paper A3 if you’ve got some and capture on that piece of paper all the different places that you have online profiles, website, social media accounts, do you have a mailing list and what categories of people are on it, do you go to networking events and what other marketing do you do.
And then on another sheet, make a note of some key bits of information about your business to remind you what you do, something that you can then refer back to. So, for example, who your clients are, what you offer, some top line stuff about your key messages that you’re using in your marketing what your vision for your business is why does it actually exist in the first place and what your current goals are with your marketing.
And then once you once you’ve got that all laid out on a piece of paper you’ll have quite a lot of information to help you take a step back. If you’ve got lots of different services in your business, and an example of this might be someone who’s a coach, who does one-to-one work, who also does workshops, who is looking at doing courses. If you’ve got a lot of different services, you could also have a separate piece of paper that maps those out, because it might be, that you’re trying to actively promote too many things at once. And perhaps that’s not going to help with changing your marketing and how you’re doing it.
So once you’ve mapped all of those out… The next thing to think about, so obviously you’ve mapped out what you’re doing at the moment, you need to think about what other marketing tactics there are and which ones will suit your needs now.
So, you know, there might be things like, do you need to go to different types of networking events? Is email going to play a bigger role at the moment? Are there are there lots of industry publications that perhaps you’ve not really done anything with, but it’s now become relevant or podcasts that you might want to appear on?
And then you can see from that where social media needs to play a role for this new audience or whether it needs to play any kind of role. You might find that you still want to use a platform, but just use it differently differently. So rather than daily posting on LinkedIn, you could just be there in the background using it to connect, message people and maybe occasionally comment if there’s something that’s particularly interesting.
If you’ve been using Instagram quite a lot, maybe you change it and you don’t want to anymore, then maybe you change it so that you have three pinned posts at the top that explain a bit more about your new approach and that really clearly lay out what you do and how to contact you. And then you don’t have to worry about those platforms and putting energy into posting on them all the time.
As I say it’s a complicated area and that’s literally just a suggestion on how to start thinking about it, it’s clearly not a definitive answer. So what what I would suggest is that if it’s obvious when you map those things out that’s great you’ll be able to move forward with that. If it’s not then it’s probably worth speaking to a marketing consultant and really getting some clarity on what your strategy should be, making sure that you know if you’re having, particularly if you’re having to spend lots of money on things, making sure that before you dive into going into new tactics actually are they the right ones that are going to achieve what you want to achieve.
So I do have a PDF that helps you map out your marketing tactics in the way that I’ve been talking about. So if that is useful, if that sounds useful, then you can get in touch with me on my website, ninalenton.co.uk. Or as I say, if you feel like a marketing consultant would be able to give you much more clarity because it’s a much bigger thing, then that sounds like a good way forward.
I hope this has been helpful and good luck.