How to market your business without making marketing your full-time job
I have a friend who recently left a job of fifteen years to make her side hustle into a full time business. Even though she’s had this second business for a few years, she’d been working exclusively on referrals and now that this is a 40+ hour gig, she needs to market and get more leads for herself.
She’s hosting and sponsoring events, sending out postcards and emails — all of which she’s coordinating and writing herself — learning how to use Facebook and LinkedIn to generate leads, attending networking events. And by the way she still has to do all the things involved in keeping her core business running. She feels really overwhelmed, she doesn’t know what is and isn’t working. She feels like this level of effort probably isn’t sustainable, but also doesn’t feel justified in hiring help yet.
This is a common challenge that solopreneurs face, especially when it comes to marketing. You have to generate revenue for your business, which means you have to get leads, which means you have to market. And all that is true.
The mistake I see many small businesses making is marketing everywhere, using every tactic they can think of, and adding more all the time. It seems like more should be better but what’s actually happening is that it’s spreading you too thin, it’s burning you out, and your efforts are not generating as many leads as they could be.
Let’s say you want to build a house. You start construction on it, and it's going well, but then you see a lot in North Carolina and it’s a really good deal and it's right on the coast, so you think ok, I’m going to build a vacation house there.
So now you have two houses mid construction. You’re splitting up your time and resources between the two. And then you find an amazing deal on a lot near the smoky mountains. You think well, I can have a mountain home AND a coastal home AND a primary residence so you break ground on that one. And you still have no houses to live in.
Then somebody gives you a hot tip on a property you can buy in Colorado — a ski home! Now you have four houses going and they'll eventually be awesome, but you actually still have no home at all. If you keep going in this way, you’re going to have a whole bunch of half built houses, but no place to live.
This is the trap people fall into with their marketing. They start a Facebook group but before they get that really going, they see how well some of their colleagues are doing on Instagram, so they add an Instagram account.
Then they figure they need some SEO, so they start a blog too. And a guy in their networking group is doing awesome with Google Ads, so they set up a google ad account, and it goes on and on until they feel like they’re doing a lot of stuff but none of it's working.
Instead, I work with my clients to put some foundations in place first, and then focus on one thing at a time.
Here’s the process we follow to help focus your marketing efforts and make them more effective.
1. The first thing you need to do is define your foundations.
Have you ever eaten at Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers? I’m not a huge fan, but my kids have spent probably millions of dollars there over the past couple years. What they serve is chicken fingers, french fries, coleslaw and toast. They do not serve burgers. They do not serve tacos. They do not even serve whole chicken breasts. They only serve chicken fingers. It’s actually their business model. This is from their website:
“we only have ONE LOVE – quality chicken finger meals! At Raising Cane’s® you get an exceptionally high quality product served quickly and conveniently. We can do this because we offer a limited menu...Our commitment to this concept will not allow us to compromise our quality, cut corners or clutter our menu with new products that do not fit our core menu offering.”
They know exactly who their perfect-fit client is, what they’re known for, how they deliver it, and the ultimate benefit customers get. They don’t spend time talking about anything else.
Which makes their marketing very simple, consistent, and memorable. And no matter what form their marketing tactics take - whether that’s an ad, social media posts, events, emails, or anything else - all of those tactics are centered on that same consistent message.
That’s why this first step is so important for you, so that you always know what to say and how to say it.
Here are the foundations I recommend my clients figure out:
Your perfect-fit client
Your one thing
Your from-to
Your method
Your ultimate benefit
The rules of your universe
For more information on these, check out my ultimate guide to social video.
2. Before you do anything else, I want you to take advantage of any warm leads you have.
Think about all your perfect-fit clients that exist out there in the world. We can put them in categories on a continuum from a cold audience, which means they’ve never even heard of you or your business to customers, people who know you really well and have done business with you.
As people start to know you and you build trust with them, they become warm leads. You’ve heard this term before. A lot of times small businesses and solopreneurs feel like they have to get their name out there and start making sure that they’re reaching more people in that cold audience.
But in doing that, they overlook warm leads. These are people that have heard of you, that you’ve built trust with, who, most importantly, are more likely to become a customer more quickly than cold leads. It’s more efficient for you to spend your energy there first.
Warm leads could be past customers who might be interested in doing business with you again, people you’ve talked to about your services, but didn’t buy that time, or people on your email list. (Don’t overlook your email list!) You can also ask your current customers for referrals.
Only when you’ve reached out to all the warm audiences you can think of is it time to turn your attention to all those shiny tactics that will reach cold audiences.
3. Map out your perfect-fit client’s journey and how you’ll move them from being a cold lead through to a customer.
You can think of this journey in four stages:
Get in front of new people
Invite them to engage with you
Keep them interested
Ask them to buy
Here’s how this might look for a gym
To get in front of new perfect-fit clients
Use Facebook ads and organic social media
To invite them to engage with you
Offer a free one-week trial of fitness classes in exchange for an email address
To keep them interested
Send a weekly email
To ask them to buy
Send the people on your list who aren’t already members an email with a promotion or sale. (Don’t do this with every email.)
When you’re defining your journey, don’t try to do too much at one time. For example, if you’re just starting out, don’t commit to reaching new people by sponsoring events and hosting a Facebook group and creating tiktoks and doing direct snail mail. When you try to do everything at once, it will be hard to get anything done. Instead focus on a single tactic at each stage and get efficient there before you add more.
Then, work your plan and experiment and tweak along the way.
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