Taking good care of your clients means taking care of your business, and one of the simplest paths to taking care of both your clients *and* your business is by tracking the numbers.
“Will this marketing approach be worth my while?” It’s a question self-employed professionals often ask. But there’s a related question that, unfortunately, they ask much less often: “How much will it cost compared to what it brings in?” Surprisingly few professionals know the answer to this crucial question, and many admit it had simply never occurred to them.
Every marketing approach has a set of costs attached. Social media ads, pay-per-click campaigns, and trade show exhibits come with a price tag in dollars. Networking mixers, business lunches, and posting/interacting on social media take up your time, and may also incur expenses.
It happens to the best of us. We have brilliant plans for marketing our business, but the rest of life keeps getting in the way. We know we won’t succeed if we don’t spend time on marketing, but somehow days and weeks slip by, and our marketing to-do list gets longer instead of shorter.
All the experts say that as a self-employed professional, you need a marketing plan, so you’ve designed one. Good for you! The very fact that you’ve taken the time to think about how you want to market your business and written it down will increase your odds of success at getting clients.
For a self-employed professional, being successful at marketing doesn’t result from one brilliant idea. Nor does it follow from stringing together a random series of marketing activities, no matter how many different approaches you manage to use. To bring in a sustainable flow of business on a consistent basis, you gotta have a system.
Over the past few months, I’ve been writing and thinking quite a bit about making post-pandemic changes in your business as a self-employed professional. First there was Reinventing Your Business to Survive a Pandemic…
Now that the world’s opening up, and you’re creating a “new normal” for your work, chances are you’ve got a vision that’s forming, one you’d like to bring to life. Which may leave you wondering… how are you supposed to do that, exactly?
As business owners, we’re all looking at the way we did business before the pandemic and asking if we really want to go back to the way it was.
I know I don’t, and neither do the clients and colleagues I’m speaking to.
For well over a year, we self-employed professionals have largely been wrapped in a home-based cocoon. Yes, many of us have continued to serve clients, sometimes even in person. But we’ve also spent a whole lot of time on Zoom. An entire category of business marketing has been absent…
If you’ve been having trouble emerging from your pandemic business cocoon, welcome to the club!
Lots of people are feeling the same way (including me). We’re having thoughts like: I don’t know where to start with marketing my business again. Or, I feel like I don’t know how to talk to people anymore. Or, I don’t want to leave my cave.
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