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Hello, my lovely awesome friends and welcome to Episode 9 of The Hayley Osborne Show.
How a marketing strategy saves you time.
As business owners and entrepreneurs, we’re all super busy right! Which is why it’s really important we save time where we can. But what tends to happen when we’re so busy in the day to day of our business is we lose sight of the periscope stuff. Those big goals. The ones where we need to take off bite size pieces, every single week to be able to achieve what we want, chipping away in order to reach those big milestones.
The weeks and months are flying past at rapid pace and before we know it, and I am sorry to say this, but it’ll be mid-year. Then you panic and check back at your goals to see what you’ve even attempted to chip away at, to realise you’re still in the same place as you were at the beginning of the year. I DON’T WANT THAT FOR YOU – no way!
This is where a marketing strategy will save you time.
Time is money and time is a commodity that we cannot reverse or get back. Although I really wish we could sometimes and I’m sure you do too, right!
Without a marketing strategy, you lack focus. Most of the time we start out so great, all guns blazing, but then it fades, and it usually fades quickly when we get submerged in our day to day lives and day to day running of the business. It’s the old saying of working in the business instead of working on the business to essentially grow the business.
What I really want you to think in terms of marketing, is that it’s not just a one off, stand alone, thing that you do. Throughout every stage you go through as a business owner in your business, from when you started, to where you are now, you’ll have different goals and action points attached to each stage that are necessities to achieve your end goal, which is…drum roll – making sales, creating more revenue, growing your business and expanding your life and lifestyle.
With all that and more going on around you all the time, it’s essential you have a marketing strategy to follow in order for your business to flourish. AND flourish with ease.
Develop a strategy first, instead of figuring it out as you go
This is the part where you don’t dive into the small tasks first. You plan the grand plan and work your way down from there. Having a plan that you can constantly refer to that will help you make important decisions throughout the quarter and guide you to make your next move is very very helpful for your business.
Clearly define your vision and goals. Then understand your audience, those that are currently apart of your world and those you want in your world. This will lend you to analysing the competitors within your industry as well which is also a very important aspect.
By clearly defining your audience and target audience it will allow you to get deep into who it is exactly you’re targeting.
In order to do this easily I like to develop a customer avatar with my clients. If you’re sitting there thinking, Hayley “I don’t know what this is”, let me explain. A customer avatar is a detailed profile of your ideal customer. This is who you want to attract 10X styles. Your ideal customer, not your “everything to everyone”. No no no.
We want to attract that right person. Their needs, pain points, desires, family structure….Every. Single. Thing. Does not mean you are targeting just one person, but you are giving yourself parameters in order to stay within your brand. Live and breathe that person (character) you have created and get working.
From here, you can then break it down even further and list all the tasks you need to do, making sure you set an achievable timeline for each task so they’re actually achievable. You and only you know your limits, so make it worth it and worth your time.
Think about where your clients are coming from, where they play and where you could reach them to maximise your time. This is where your creativity really comes into play.
When you are creating your strategy, think about your ever green content. The content that is not just here today and gone tomorrow.
Think about including an element of batching your content. How, what and where you can. Things like:
- Your blog posts
- Podcasts
- EDM’s (electronic direct mail)
- Use saved replies to send your customers to save you time
- Batch your hashtags
Play where it lights you up the most. For instance, if Instagram is your jam and you know that’s where your clients hang out, then this is for you. If you know that LinkedIn is the place you inspire most of your target audience, then all your efforts need to be in LinkedIn. Rather than trying to be everything to every platform and spreading yourself thinly, you only need to be where it matters most. That is to start anyway. Do it well and once you have your consistent flow, branch out a little further. But like I said, do you research.
But why do I need a marketing strategy?
Without it, you cannot make adjustments and grow at the same time. This also limits your ability to grow as well as scale as you move forward. Without doing anything with consistency you will never really give your business the chance it deserves and you’re also limiting your mindset.
Tweaks and adjustments throughout the year to your strategy
As you grow as a business and as your brand evolves, so should your strategy. Details on how you’re going to get to that next step will change and move. But essentially your strategy should provide you with an awesome template of where to start, how to improve on your already proven results and make adjustments along each campaign you tackle instead of completely starting from the beginning every single time.
How nice would it feel to have stability and a somewhat sense of predictability on your marketing touchpoints throughout the year.
Let’s look at it this way, and you know if you’ve been listening to my podcast and following along my social media, I love a good analogy. Analogy’s just uncomplicate everything. From the most complicated marketing jargon that gets thrown around, to a simplified easy to understand version. That exactly the way I like to do things.
Your marketing strategy is like a menu at a restaurant. Mostly it will stay the same throughout the year, entrée, main and dessert. Each of the selections under these headings will be safe to basically stay the same essentially.
But as the seasons change, as the chef evolves their recipes, the menu is going to change accordingly to accommodate. As time moves forward, we get better and smarter as business owners, we learn more and we grow.
In terms of a marketing strategy, your businesses quarterly menu more or less looks the same. I know mine does. But we are always working towards achieving more brand awareness, higher growth, reaching more of our target audience and attracting more leads.
In a nutshell we’re on a path to getting that darn menu absolutely perfect, much the same as the chef at the restaurant. We’re using our variety of things “marketing tools” to choose from what’s on the menu such as email marketing, SEO, Facebook ads (anddd the list goes on and on). We are always altering the recipes in the menu, but essentially it stays the same. You just get smarter and smarter as the awesome business owner that you are as time goes on.
Carrie Green from the Female Entrepreneurs association often says, “you can’t compare your 1 to someone else’s 20”. Meaning there will always be someone doing the thing you want to do; but they’ve been doing it for a long time. You just do you and pave that path of your own.
So, to recap:
Your marketing strategy is the key to growing your business.
It’s the key to having the clarity around exactly where you’re going.
It’s the HOW to how you’re going to get there.
It’s the test you need to really double down and be the best version of yourself in your business.
It’s the best time saving document you will ever own and essentially your business marketing manual.
That concludes this episode my lovely friends and thank you so much for listening.
I really do hope this episode has helped to motivate and inspire you to create a marketing strategy to set you on the right path of business growth in 2022.
x
Hayley
