This article is guest-written by Marketing Strategist Rebecca Tall Brown. Her home location is Mission Valley and she’s been a member since May, 2012.
June is the perfect month to dust off your cowgirl boots and jean skirt and try your hand at a little Do-It-Yourself Marketing. That’s right, it’s DIY Marketing Month!
What no one has probably shared with you is that Marketing is the final frontier of business fun. And this month, being DIY Marketing Month, is the perfect time for you to stop researching and start DOING (and letting yourself have fun).
In fact, if there’s one simple tip I’d give you as your marketing mantra, it’s this: START.
Hub member and all around amazing business owner Jeannel King of Big Picture Solutions knows what I’m talking about.
Jeannel and I put on our cowgirl boots and pulled together all of the foundations for a series of workshops.
These workshops weren’t just workshops for the sake of workshops. Oh, no, no, no.
Like you, we’re ladies with big agendas and Jeannel wanted these to be seeds planted for future growth.
She ALSO has her second book coming out and wanted to use workshop formats to test her brilliant models on real, live groups.
Her workshops were sell-outs, and more importantly, her book made fabulous momentum. So much so that she’s got an even bigger workshop this month to help train people to facilitate with drawing!
So how’d we do it? Let’s investigate the steps Jeannel and I took so that you can benefit – we want to give you clear steps to gussy-up your marketing this month!
1) Decide what your goal is.
For all of you who attended the strategic planning days in the past, you’re well-versed in goals. There’s no reason that marketing shouldn’t also have a clear goal. Are you looking to get more traffic to your website? Are you looking to grow your newsletter list? Or maybe you’re looking to simply have the next hub member you meet “get it” when you explain what you do.
In Jeannel’s case, she was feeling what lots of us feel – like we “have to” host workshops. And that same-old, same-old wasn’t fun for her. Together we worked through what Jeannel was trying to do and we realized that Jeannel loves hosting parties, NOT holding workshops.
So out of our discussion, we realized that Jeannel’s goal wasn’t workshops for the sake of workshops, It was actually to try out the models of her upcoming book in front of real people.
Once we knew her goal, it then became about DIY Marketing Step #2
2) Find the Spark that lights YOU up.
I’m a firm believer that for busy business owners, the marketing that gets done is the marketing that’s fun.
If you hate speaking but love writing, I don’t encourage you to make the uphill climb. And if you love to speak but are pretty willy-nilly about follow-up, I’d encourage you to build your marketing process around getting your attendees to take the action – not you.
In Jeannel’s case, her workshops turned into Stick Figure Strategist Parties – complete with gift bags and snacks for all of her guests. Additionally, she wrote out emails inviting people in a way that she was thrilled to send out – she was giddy getting her own test email.
And guess what happened? The emails went OUT. The workshops were held. ACTION was taken because we uncovered what Jeannel was so gosh darn passionate about: the art of hosting HER people.
If the idea of uncovering your spark makes you feel plumb tuckered out before you begin, it’s here that I recommend you do something very different for DIY Marketing Month.
3) Give yourself permission to observe what YOU like.
Instead of feeling obligated to stuff inboxes full of messages and gum up social media with things that you’re not particularly fond of for the sake of it is no way to belly up to the bar of marketing.
Instead, go ahead and give yourself permission this month to build a folder or board of emails you LOVE opening. Of messages you can’t wait to hear, or of LinkedIn updates that make you hungry for more.
It takes a bit of space to be able to learn and find your own voice and the pressure to create kicks curiosity right out of Dodge.
Instead, simply start to notice:
-Do you like getting messages with lots of words or only a few?
-Do you like getting pictures or text, or both?
-Do you like getting things that are more funny or serious in nature?
If you’d like to learn more about DIY Marketing join Rebecca’s free Marketing 101 class (both members and non-members welcome) on Monday, June 23rd at 6p in Sorrento.
