It is easy to get overwhelmed when you are trying to pull a marketing strategy together for your business.
You are living and breathing it and sometimes you need to take a step back and assess what’s really necessary.
Your competitors seem to be everywhere, you are nowhere! You feel that you need to be everywhere but you don’t know where to start. Well that one is easy! Forget the competition. For now at least.
Take a blank piece of paper write the thing you are trying to resolve in the middle. So if it was marketing simply write this and start to think around what is necessary to make progress with it.
You may have a few branches coming out of the centre for communications, platforms, online, offline, customers, competitors, challenges, quick wins etc but don’t analyse too much at this stage. Allow yourself to just keep populating the different branches and before you know it you have a plan! It might not look like one in its current format but everything you need to start effectively marketing your business is in there. You just need to turn it into clear actions and get started.
The two things you need to be clear on are who you are talking to and how you are going to do that.
Have you profiled your prospects? Do you know what keeps them awake at night? Can you provide a solution to those worries and issues? Assuming the answer to the last question is yes, you simply need to stand up and let them know you are here, are ready and are able to help them.
BUT. And this is a big but! Ask yourself what you enjoy doing. Be honest. If you are a writer, you may really hate talking in public so producing video will be a chore. If you are a talker, putting pen to paper may send you running for the hills. There is no point choosing to commit to marketing strategies that you are going to struggle to motivate yourself to implement. Of course you don’t have to do it yourself but I am assuming you will for the purposes of this article.
It’s common sense really. If every time you think about having to produce something in a format that makes you uncomfortable, then you feel down and gloomy. And guess what? It’ll soon be evident to whoever is reading/watching/listening to your material that you are not enjoying yourself either.
So the point of this post is you cannot possibly do everything and do everything well. I would suggest choosing three things that you can happily do consistently that you will enjoy doing and therefore be motivated to do. You can build on these as you start to increase engagement but don’t wait for things to be perfect to get started.
If you need any help with getting an action plan in place, please get in touch.