Is Procrastination Holding Back Your Marketing?
When you look at your marketing to-do list, do many of the items on it look all too familiar? Have entries like “call Dolores Sanchez” and “follow up with Wallingford Corp.” been copied from a previous week? Putting off unappealing tasks may be human nature, but for a self-employed professional, procrastination can be deadly.
Delays in contacting a prospect can lose the business to the competition. Failing to get the word out about an upcoming event may forfeit dozens of opportunities. When prospects don’t hear from you for a while, they forget you exist. Wasted marketing time can never be recovered. By the time you realize you might not make your sales goals for the month, quarter, or year, it may already be too late.
What Makes Marketing So Hard?
“Marketing is hard.” That’s what we independent professionals tell each other, anyway. At meetings, workshops, and online, wherever entrepreneurs gather, the difficulty of getting clients is a frequent topic.
There’s certainly some truth to this statement. Marketing your services can be one of the most challenging elements of being in business for yourself. But does marketing have to be as hard as we seem to think it is? Maybe not.
In fact, I’ve noticed that professionals often make marketing much harder than it needs to be. Here are six ways that entrepreneurs frequently turn marketing into much more of a struggle than necessary.
Boost Your Marketing with the Buddy System
Remember back in grade school when the teacher asked you to hold hands with a friend on field trips? The idea behind the buddy system is that it’s much harder to get lost if there are two of you traveling together. When you get into trouble, your buddy can help you out, or find someone else who can.
Maybe you could use a buddy in your marketing. The constant challenges you encounter while promoting yourself and your services make sales and marketing a difficult road to travel all alone, and it’s easy to get lost. Working with a marketing buddy can give you:
Why You Need to Include Outreach Strategies in Your Marketing Mix
I’m a big fan of using attraction strategies to fill your marketing pipeline as a self-employed professional. Attraction-based tactics like blogging or publishing articles, posting on social media, and generating media publicity can all be effective ways to bring prospective clients into your sphere. Under the right circumstances, promotional events and advertising can work also.
And… attraction strategies alone are rarely enough to build a thriving business.
Marketing along the Path of Least Resistance
Do you find sales and marketing to often be a struggle? It doesn’t have to be that way. The most successful professionals make it look easy because they have found a way to market themselves that is effortless. Perhaps you have tried to copy what those successful people were doing, and it didn’t work for you. Here’s why.
Marketing is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. You have to find your own unique path, the one that works best for you and your business. To make marketing and selling easy, that path needs to be the one where you will encounter the least resistance — both from the marketplace and from inside yourself.
Four Consequences of Using the Wrong Marketing Strategy
Perhaps these questions sound familiar:
What happens if I use the wrong marketing strategy?
Is there such a thing as a wrong marketing strategy?
These questions are common if you’re a service-based business looking to market your services; it’s easy to think you’re doing marketing all wrong.
And maybe you are.
While there is no real right or wrong way when it comes to marketing your business, there is such a thing as choosing a marketing strategy that isn’t the right fit for you and your ideal customers – strategies that can make marketing feel harder – and this can have negative consequences.
10 Ways to Know Your Marketing is Working
It can be challenging at times to know if your marketing is working. You’re putting yourself out there, yet how can you tell if you’re succeeding? Read on for 10 ways to know if your marketing is working.
- You’re attracting clients who are a fit for you.
If you’ve done a good job of identifying your ideal client, and the marketing you do speaks directly to them, you will disproportionately attract people who are in alignment with you, what you do, and who see the value in what you’re offering. This begs the question that you know who your ideal client is, and if you don’t, you can read more about how to discover them here.
Is Your Marketing Missing Some Basics?
It might have happened that when you started your business, you told a few people what you were up to and clients just showed up. You may have had the good fortune of not having to work too hard to get noticed or think much about the details of your marketing; things just seemed to take off.
(If you’re saying to yourself, “Is she for real? This actually happens to people, where they don’t have to struggle to get clients, especially at the beginning?” The answer is yes, it’s a real thing.)
Not Feeling the Marketing Love?
Ever have one of those days when you’re just not feelin’ it? You can’t seem to get yourself to do any marketing. The marketing you’re doing doesn’t feel inspiring. You’re not sure where to start to make things different. The thoughts swirling around in your head are making you suspect you might be a business fraud. Sounds like you’re not feeling the marketing love.
The good news is you can do something about it.
To minimize the days where you’re feeling out of sorts, marketing-wise, allow the following to serve as inspiration to help you feel the love again.
Are You in the Mood to Market Your Business?
There you sit: you know you need to do something to get the word out about your business and get the clients flowing in, yet you’re not in the mood. In fact, you’re mostly never in the mood to do marketing. The problem is, no marketing = no clients = no money = no impact with the work you’re here to bring to the world, which is a sad state to be in.
“Even if you don’t feel like sitting down to write or working on that big proposal, or whatever it is, just show up anyhow and the rest will follow.”
– Ayana Mathis
Getting in the mood to market is a mind shift, one you can bring on yourself. Consider these tactics when you’re just not feelin’ it:
