The following is an adapted excerpt from Pitching Clients 101. You can learn more about how to market your business, including get a fillable worksheet for your very own marketing strategy template, in that e-course.
Marketing is a REALLY important piece of any business. As Stew pointed out in episode 7 of the Candid Conversations podcast,
“The better product doesn’t always win… A great product that is marketed well will win.”
How very true that is!
Being strategic and smart about your marketing is essential to ensuring your business has legs to stand on and that your services and/or products actually make sales. So often in business, we get caught up in creating products or doing work for clients... and we don't pay as much attention to marketing our businesses consistently.
What happens next? Well, if you don't ensure that marketing is a priority in your business, you might find yourself hitting a wall. You will have difficulty growing your business. And if you neglect marketing altogether, you might start going backwards when it comes to business progress.
There's no doubt about it that marketing is important.
But... where do you even begin? That's the real question!
The first thing you need to do is to create a marketing strategy.
If you don't have a marketing plan in place, you won't be able to be strategic with your marketing efforts. So you'll just wind up promoting yourself all over the place, without any actual direction... and it won't be effective at all.
That's why, before you even begin putting your marketing ideas into practice, you should create a marketing strategy for your business.
Here's what I've included in my very own marketing strategy (you can steal this basic marketing strategy template for creating your own!):
1) Marketing as a priority.
In a few sentences, highlight why marketing is so important for you and your business. By having this at the beginning of your marketing strategy, you’ll be reminded of its importance every time you look at it!
You might want to use some of the points I mentioned above, or you might have an entirely different set of reasons for why marketing is crucial to prioritize in your business.
For example:
- Prioritizing strategic marketing will ensure my business grows, rather than just treads water or stagnates.
- Marketing in a strategic way will help me attract my ideal clients/customers.
- Being mindful of my marketing efforts will help me to save time, money, and energy.
- Focusing on being savvy with my marketing tactics now will enable me to spend significantly less time on it in the future.
2) Your elevator pitch.
Write ONE sentence that explains what you do. It should be a sentence that a) is easy to understand, and b) invokes curiosity for more information. Try to repeat it often on social media etc., and memorize it so you can use it at networking events.
At its most basic, your elevator pitch should explain exactly what it is that you offer with your business. Don't overthink it! Your elevator pitch is probably a lot simpler than you think it needs to be.
For example:
Juxta Communications is a communications education agency providing education material, online courses, and in-person training for all things digital marketing and freelancing.
3) Types of marketing to prioritize.
There are so many different types of marketing you could focus on! What type of marketing will YOU prioritize? Why will you prioritize those types? Outline that here in a few paragraphs.
Keep in mind that you should (as always!) be strategic about the types of marketing you choose to do. For example, time or financial constraints may affect what marketing tactics you choose. It's also crucial to keep in mind who your ideal client or customer is when you're deciding what type of marketing to prioritize.
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4) Potential barriers to purchase.
Make as detailed of a list as you can outlining the top 3---5 barriers your audience faces in purchasing from you, and what you’ll do to overcome those barriers. We wrote a full four pages outlining this in our strategy! It’s important to get as detailed as possible about specifics.
Here, you're going to identify problem areas as well as what you are currently doing to work around those issues, and what you will do in the future to continue helping your ideal client overcome the obstacles. It's good to make notes here of anecdotal evidence and what you feel in your gut are the issues.
5) Market research.
The above potential barriers to purchase are probably based on conversations you’ve had and/or your own assumptions. In this section, outline what you’ll do to confirm whether or not your assumptions are correct.
There's a lot of value in you first writing down your preconceived notions (essentially, your hypothesis!) so that you can then compare that with real-world evidence once you do market research.
Examples of market research could include analysis of survey data, in-depth focus groups with individuals or small groups made up of your ideal client/customer, and creating a comprehensive database of past clients/customers.
6) Marketing timeline.
Having an at-a-glance overview of your marketing ideas will help you to check out what’s realistic with your plans! We did this as a simple two-column table, listing the month of the year and one to two areas of our “primary focus” with marketing for each month.
It doesn't need to be anything fancy: in fact, the point of it is that it should be easy to look at quickly to determine what your upcoming weeks and months will look like.
7) Marketing efforts.
This is going to be the biggest section (ours is five pages and covers 14 different ideas). You’ll list here all the ideas you have for marketing your services/products, for example in-person networking, email marketing, Facebook ads, etc., and you’ll list some concrete tactics for how you’ll implement each one. You can even include more in-depth timelines in a table format.
I recommend listing these in order of priority---for example, our final six ideas haven’t even been fleshed out yet because they’re all tactics that we won’t even begin to think about implementing until we have the foundations in place. It might be another year or so before we get to those last strategies on the list, so we’re not worrying about them just yet.
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See this in action...
Inside Pitching Clients 101, you can get a fillable worksheet version of this marketing strategy template plus the inside scoop on real-life strategies that work (and don't work) for freelance businesses.
Pitching Clients 101 contains everything you need to know about finally landing your dream clients!
“Sagan's marketing ideas and tips have taken a lot of the myths out of how to find clients, so I feel more prepared than ever to start pitching!”
– Lauren
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