Marketing For Solopreneurs
How To Market Your One-Man Business
It can be intimidating trying to run a one-man show. There’s a lot of balls in the air and marketing can feel like one ball too many. But as a solopreneur marketing plays an essential role in your business. Here are the top tips for marketing your one-man business.
Plan out your days
Without anyone else to track your time or decide when things need to be done, it can be challenging to stick to a schedule. Take the guess work out of your days and set daily tasks that will help to keep your administration in the business to a minimum, respond to any enquiries, emails or messages for the first hour. Prioritise your tasks for the day and track your progress on projects as you go to ensure an easy reporting process for clients.
Make sure you’re allocating time for your marketing activities and lead generation.
Design marketing strategy
It’s no use to shoot in the dark with marketing, most industries are saturated with businesses trying to be noticed, you’ll need a clear marketing strategy. To design your marketing strategy, consider what kind of clients or customers you are trying to attract, where you’ll focus your marketing efforts to attract the most leads, multiple lead generation systems on your website, on local business listing sites and on our social media accounts.
Review other businesses like yours and consider what they are doing well and what they are doing poorly, then consider your point of difference in the market and speak to that in your marketing.
Ask yourself what problems your product or service solves for your customer or client and use this in your marketing strategy.
Get to know the ideal client avatar
There is a saying in marketing – if you’re talking to everyone then you’re talking to no-one. What this basically means is that your marketing should specifically target your ideal client avatar. To work out who this is, look at clients you’ve already worked with and clients you want to work with. Complete interviews with willing customers or clients and get a good understanding of who they are. What kind of popular culture do they identify with? How old are they? How much do they earn? What kinds of jobs do they do? Where are they located?
Build a clear picture of who they are and what they like, so that when you’re creating marketing materials, copy for your site, social media content or lead generating activities you can speak directly to them and inspire them to buy.
Set aside a day for content creation and lead generation
This one is important. Set aside one day per week to work on lead generation either chasing outbound leads or updating and managing your inbound lead funnels. A lot of inbound lead funnels come from content marketing. This could be blogs on your site to attract the right kind of client and showcase your product or service or it could be social media content that builds trust in the brand and creates relationships between the brand and the customer.
Setting aside one day or even half a day to review, tweak or actively generate leads will ensure you’ve always got more work coming in.
Social media is your friend
Social media can be intimidating for a small business; it can look like a lot of work, but you can simplify this process. Review your ideal client avatar and see where they are hanging out most online then just concentrate on two – three social media platforms and do them well. You don’t have to post everyday but if you don’t post consistently the algorithm won’t know when to push out your content resulting in less engagement for the posts.
If three posts a week are all you can manage to take the time to create three posts. Try to balance your content strategy offering relatable, entertaining or educational content 80% of the time and promoting yourself and your business 20% of the time.
There can be an overlap with this. If watching your product being made is entertaining then it doubles as a promotional opportunity to showcase your product. Sharing your business’s journey will help your customers to relate to your brand and get them on your side, wanting to support you and celebrate your wins. Don’t be afraid to let your personality shine through on social media, people buy from people at the end of the day not businesses.
Create ever-green marketing content
Lead generating funnels that are evergreen are things like a free downloadable document on your website that gets your client’s email address, or a 10% discount if they sign up to the mailing list. Once set up these funnels sit there, doing the work for you. You can even set automated emails to chase them up for a sale once they have completed this task. And because it requires no updates or changes, it is evergreen content.
On social media and on your blog evergreen content is anything that isn’t time sensitive or going to need updating. Social media posts explaining your business offerings, or explainer blogs that will help them decide between products or services are evergreen content. You can share them over and over and they will always be relevant. Getting together a folder with evergreen content will help you stay on top of your content marketing strategy.
Build your mailing list
One thing people tend to put less importance on in the age of social media is building your mailing list. But this is a mistake, social media is ever-changing, people might unfollow you or shut down their accounts, and your account could be hacked or shut down at some point and then you can lose that audience you’ve so worked hard to build.
Regular calls on socials to join your mailing list will help you transfer your social media audience to your mailing list. Getting as much information as possible from people in the mailing can help you market on multiple levels, getting mobile numbers is especially helpful as sms marketing returns an average ROI of 500%.
Automate everything
If you’re the one and only member of your organisation, you know your time is precious, so automate everything you can. Lead generating funnels can be set up with your mailing system to begin a sales funnel email automation, first checking in and thanking the customer for downloading the PDF document or for signing up to the mailing list and then checking in if they haven’t progressed to using the 10% discount or booking in to discuss services.
Automated email marketing, re-marketing campaigns and auto-booking systems can save you hundreds of hours over the course of the year, look to automate everything you can to save yourself time and money.
Network
When you’re running a small business networking is crucial. Get out to events, chat with people on socials, join Facebook groups, meet others in your niche or field. There are often small business groups you can join to meet other entrepreneurs and network with small business owners. And these can be so valuable for cross marketing, there may be some kind of mutually beneficial referral system you could work out with them. For example if you offer waxing services, you might befriend an eyelash technician and you can refer clients to each other.
In Facebook groups offering help and suggestions can build your reputation in your field and lead to more clients. And on socials, remember to actually get social, engage with your core audience and customers, talk to them in the comments, follow their page and interact with them. It generates a better relationship with the brand.
Final Thoughts
Marketing can be a lot to think about, but it’s worth putting in the effort if you want to grow your brand and business. If you’re looking for ways to expand your brand you can check out our small business courses. These courses can help you get a good understanding of all the particulars you might need to take your business to the next level. Check out the courses here or get in touch with us and we can help guide you to the best course for you and your business.