Do you have marketing overwhelm?
How to focus your marketing and boost business
We’ve had a recurring question crop up with clients and our community alike in the past few weeks: How can you determine exactly where to put your marketing efforts? As a small business owner, it’s essential that you place your time, money, and efforts into the areas that matter. Yet, deciding what those areas are, is not always as easy as it sounds. With so many marketing channels at our fingertips and with every single one of them launching a new feature every two seconds, it is easy to feel overwhelmed.
We (should) all have a website that we need to market and maintain. Many of us will run email marketing campaigns and a regular newsletter function to speak to our clientele. Some of you will run a blog or news platform. There’s then PR, podcasts, brand partnerships, and influencer marketing to name just a few. Social media alone, is a huge category, consisting of several platforms (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok etc). Within each of these platforms, there are multiple ways you can develop content to speak to your market. Let’s take Instagram as an example. It’s expanded from the traditional grid posts to including live streams, stories, reels, guides and IGTV - and that’s just organic…paid ads is a whole separate piece of the puzzle. Is your head hurting yet?
Now, if you’re lucky enough to have endless pools of money and a vast team at your fingertips, targeting and achieving success across all of these channels, is a walk in the park. But sadly, that’s not the reality for the majority of us. And yet we still put an enormous amount of pressure on ourselves to do it all. Imposter syndrome sets in all too easily when you see others seemingly doing more than you are. Rest assured, dear reader, that no small business can maintain all these channels without external support and splurging some cash. Don’t let yourself be overcome with imposter syndrome! Rule number one for beating marketing overwhelm? Stop thinking you have to do it all.
So, how do you determine the right mix of marketing channels for your business?
“You don’t need to be doing everything by yourself. You don’t need to be copying what other people are doing to be successful. It is your business and you get to decide everything about it. So why not start winning more business by doing less?”
1. Choose what you love
We all have our preferences when it comes to marketing. Some of us are Twitter fiends whereas others are Instagram addicts. Some of us love writing and find blogging a dream, whereas others find this a tedious and mundane task to keep on top of. Listen to your heart. What do you love? What makes you feel good?
Got the answer? Great! Now forget about everything else. Allow yourself to focus solely on the marketing tactics that you enjoy and forget about the ones that you hate. This will start to make marketing more enjoyable and you can beat those feelings of overwhelm, allowing you to work more productively and bring real benefit to your business and your clients.
By focusing on the marketing methods you love, you’ll also find it easier to be consistent, and when it comes to good marketing consistency is key. If you post on Instagram every day, you should continue posting on Instagram every day. If you release a new podcast every Wednesday, you should keep releasing a new podcast every Wednesday. If your newsletter gets sent out on the 1st of the month, it should get sent out on the 1st of every month. If you break the schedule every once in a while, that’s okay. But by choosing the methods best suited to you, you become more reliable and your audience knows exactly when and where they can find you. Plus, you’ve enjoyed every ounce of effort you’ve put in.
2. Choose what you’re good at
You can also focus your marketing efforts on things that you’re good at. What comes naturally to you? What do you find easier to manage and takes less effort for you to do? If you’re a whizz at SEO and know you can get your website ranking relatively easily, then go for it. But, if you’re a novice in understanding Google’s ranking system, don’t try and learn all this when there are so many other marketing avenues you can take that would be more advantageous to your marketing strategy to focus on. Doing something you area already familiar with will help your marketing efforts feel less laborious and you’ll free up more of your time to focus on the things that matter most.
If there is a marketing tactic that you want to improve on and learn more about, we aren’t telling you to not do this. Personal growth, evolution, and learning go hand-in-hand with business growth. However, if you’re feeling overwhelmed and confused, now is not the time. Start with what you know and expand your knowledge as and when you feel ready, not all at once, and certainly not because you’re copying what others are doing.
3. Where are your audience lurking?
There’s no point putting all of your marketing efforts into writing long-form blog posts if your ideal clients are busy people with hectic lives who prefer listening to podcasts on their morning commute. You might be great at blogging and you might love writing, but if it’s not where your customers are then it’s time wasted. You won’t receive any new business from it, and any business you do attract won’t be your target audience.
Thankfully, as small business owners, we should all know the ins and outs of our ideal customer profile. We know what makes them tick and what drives them crazy. We know their passions and their morals. We know where they spend their free time and how we can most successfully reach them through marketing. Use this knowledge and nail marketing on the channels where you know your perfect customers are. Yes, you won’t be reaching everyone if you are only using half the available options, but you’ll be reaching the most valuable people – the ones that you want to work with the most.
4. Choose based on your business goals
We can tell you time and time again not to compare your business to others. It is your business, and it is unique and wonderful and brilliant for precisely that reason. You do not need to compare yourself against anyone else. But we also know that not sneaking a peek at what others are up to is near impossible. We are all guilty of it. Next time you are having a nosey on your competitors' websites, socials, and email marketing campaigns though, realise that they may have completely different business goals to you right now.
Do you even know what your goals are? Are you marketing because you feel like that is what everyone else is doing, or have you a clear vision of what you want to achieve? Your goals could be anything! Perhaps you want to increase traffic for your website or improve your conversion rate. Maybe you want to increase your engagement on social media. Or you could be trying to grow your email list. Whichever you choose, make sure your goals are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely) and choose the marketing tactic that will help you reach these milestones more quickly and most effectively.
Using these tips will help you decide what marketing channels to focus on and allow you to tackle marketing overwhelm head-on. You don’t need to be doing everything by yourself. You don’t need to be copying what other people are doing to be successful. It is your business and you get to decide everything about it.
