How to Ensure Your Marketing Approach Best Fits Your Business
You think you know how marketing is supposed to be done. To successfully market your coaching, healing or creative business, you need to do videos, FB lives, IG stories. Email your list once a week (at least!) or more with multiple offers. Write a blog. Host a podcast. Have a YouTube channel. Get interviewed. Hold webinars. Healing seminars. Be all over social - the more platforms the better…
That’s a big list. And, it isn’t exhaustive.
It is, however, exhausting.
I see many coaches, healers and creatives struggle with marketing their businesses in part because they’re taking the advice out there that says they need to do all the marketing things. (And some are avoiding marketing all together because it seems like it is all too much!)
Why Marketing Like This Seems to Make Sense
On the surface, you have good reason to want to do this. You love your work. It's your soul's purpose. It's why you're here. And, you want people to find you. You want to help people, and, you want your business to sustain you. You want to be able to make a real living, and more, by doing what you love.
It's so understandable. I haven't met a coach, healer or creative entrepreneur yet who doesn't want these things for her business. I want that for you too.
What many marketing coaches say is that if you want people to find you and hire you, you have to be where they are. That makes sense. But then, they say, unless and until you know where your ideal clients are, you have to cover your bases and try to find them everywhere.
Some might like reading. Others might only listen to podcasts. Still others, videos. Some are on Facebook and some not. They might use Tik Tok or not. Instagram. Pinterest. They might read their email or never open their inbox.
But trying to be in all those places, across all those platforms and producing content in all those different formats can put you into an exhausting and not very effective spin cycle.
I've spoken to people who are spending all of their time doing all the things, a list a mile long, drained of joy, and they’re not making much traction.
Or at least the kind of movement that leads to paying clients.
A Solution for Someone Else
What’s really going on is that most of the marketing strategies out there are based on something that worked well for that coach, him or herself. They are marketing it to you, now, as 'the thing' that's going to help you land clients, launch your business, make six figures, realize your dreams, and so on.
You just need to sign up. Right here. If you want to make 100K or more this program is for YOU!
I won’t delve into why most of the marketers marketing to coaches, healers and other creatives don't provide the whole picture here. That's a topic for another day. But I do want to explore a truth that most marketing folks don't talk about.
Much of the way marketing is 'supposed to be done' is geared toward businesses that are already fully developed and established. And not toward businesses just starting out or developing.
Marketing Well Is About Using Your Resources Wisely
If your business is not yet bringing in a steady, predictable income, you need to be judicious with your financial resources. You might be able to a bookkeeper, but other more robust hires might be out of your reach financially right now. The truth is you’re growing your business; you need to learn a lot of new skills. You’re learning how to sell, network, market authentically, create educational content, or develop compelling offers.
Taking on new marketing forms and platforms means learning each medium or channel well. That includes the technical aspects as well as best practices. Like what size photos to upload, what hashtags work well. And so on.
Spreading yourself too thin marketing across many channels makes learning any one of these well more difficult.
If you’re business isn’t fully developed yet, you also might need to supplement your income with another full or part time job. What this means is the number of hours you have to devote to your business is even more limited, making it more important to prioritize your time and resources.
If, on the other hand, you have an established business, with a host of different types of programs, products and services on offer and a good and predictable flow of clients coming in the door, you have more resources and more options. You can help for your business. Depending on where your own strengths and gifts lie, you may hire an all-around assistant. You could also hire help with digital marketing, content creation, copywriting, video production, email campaigns, podcast development, and more.
This is the type of help that lets you really expand your business' presence across more platforms and channels.
But you likely aren’t there yet.
What to Do Instead? Marketing For Where You Are
If it doesn’t make sense to do “all the things,” marketing when you’re still developing your business what should you do instead?
Here are a few principles I use when working with clients:
Focus on your gifts
Everyone is born with a purpose and a unique set of talents, gifts and way of being in the world that’s imprinted on their soul. This genius is singular and forms a person’s divine essence. When you’re using your genius, things seem effortless. And, people can more clearly sense your authenticity – a key component to effective authentic marketing.
There are no rules that says you have to blog or that you have to do video. Find a medium that feels fun to you and focus on that to start your content creation.
Choose email + 1 or 2
Communicating with email is still a highly effective marketing tool, so plan to use it in your marketing strategy - even if your list is small. Hubspot reported 2020 data from OptinMonster that said “99% of email users check their inbox every day, with some checking 20 times a day.” You always own your email addresses and content, which is not the case on many social platforms.
In addition to email, you can choose one (at most two) social platforms to focus on. I recommend using the platform you already use the most. This cuts down on the initial learning curve and lets you sometimes leverage existing followers as well.
Be consistent
Plan to share your content to your newsletter list regularly, ideally weekly and no less than every other week. Pick a day you’ll email your newsletter and do your best to stick to that day. It might take a bit in the beginning to develop consistency and get used to the rhythm. That’s ok. People want to know when to expect content from you.
With your social platform(s), decide the minimum number of day’s you’ll post and commit to keeping that. Be realistic though. Consistency on social is better than a big flurry followed by a big absence.
Monitor engagement, lightly
It’s helpful to know your open and click rates for email for a baseline and to check in every once and a while to see which posts seem to have generated good engagement, but don’t obsess. It can take time to get traction, to start hearing from people about your content, to start to see responses.
Audience building isn’t done overnight –– even though everyone seems to know a story about someone who it happened to. Alicia Keys, who was in the industry working for years before her song “Fallin’” got her noticed as an ‘overnight sensation,’ said "People think you're an overnight success because this is the first time they've seen you. It's just that no one ever sees you when you're heads-down and working hard in the shadows."
If you find yourself engaging in a bunch of different marketing strategies, using multiple mediums, across many channels, and you’re not getting results or you’re feeling like marketing is leaving you feeling rundown. Or if you’re NOT marketing because the thought of doing it like this is too much, don’t worry.
While there’s good reason to think this is the way you’re supposed to go about marketing, if you’re business is still developing, you need a much simpler approach. By choosing activities that align with your gifts and feel fun, narrowing your focus to a few channels, being consistent and lightly monitoring your engagement, you’ll be better able to use your resources and concentrate your marketing efforts in a more effective way.