Success secrets for building your own marketing strategies
Something has been on my mind recently and I thought it could be helpful to share.
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a workshop with a room full of local creatives in a business setting goals for next year. A few have run successful businesses with big names in their portfolios, generating work consistently from a strong referral network over the last decade. With an economic turn this workflow had significantly slowed down and now they were in a tight spot.
It was an interesting experience for me being in this room because it highlighted something I had to learn very early on - as I started this business five years ago now as a fresh graduate, I never had a strong referral network or any network at all.
Learning how to market my business and get in front of people, then how to nurture those leads into clients, was not a nicety; it was a necessity
At the time, not having any marketing strategies and in turn, not being able to find the clients I wanted was very stressful and high-pressure. And also made me feel powerless in a certain capacity. I was hoping clients would find me and as a result had this lingering fear that everything would dry up and I would lose it all and would not be able to do anything about it and then that fear came to life at the start of 2022. Yikes.
Which as I’m sure you can imagine it is a desolate and dire place to be trying to operate a creative business from. But as a result I had to develop my own set of effective marketing strategies.
And now three and a half years later, I can happily say I have never been in this position again and wanted to share what helped me develop strategies that supported my business.
So my three success secrets for building your own marketing strategies:
1. Ditch the victim mindset (sorry it’s tough love)
I think when business feels like it’s slowing down, it’s easy to slide into a bit of a victim mindset, maybe feel like you’re at the hands of the economic climate, your competitors have bested you or whatever else has caused this.
Instead of spiralling and pointing the finger, take a little bit of control and responsibility back. You can figure this out and you can use this experience to make your business better. I think, regardless of what got you here it can be very disempowering to sit in that mentality long term. Take radical responsibility.
2. Get creative
I think inevitably if you are trying to reach new people and connect to a higher volume of people - in its most simplest form, you probably need to either do more of what you are already doing, or do something differently.
So have a think on how you landed your last five clients, are you able to do more of what connected you to them? Or I have an exercise recommendation if you need to integrate some new strategies. Write down 20 ways you could get your business in front of more people. Think billboard, think influencer collab, maybe a flyer drop with a promotion? Be creative, be curious and truly think outside the box.
3. Don’t attach too hard to a timeline, be patient and repeat.
As you go about trying these I think it’s important to be mindful of your thoughts - the brain loves to collect evidence to support your perception on a situation so if you are still in a victim mentality you might try out one of your ideas for one week, see no results you could unknowingly use this to confirm the problem is still “insert external factor”. From my experience building my own strategies they always took minimum three times longer than I thought they would so it’s helpful to switch “this isn’t working” to this “just because this isn’t working as quickly as I thought it would, doesn’t mean it’s not working”.
Stay on the path, you only “fail” when you stop trying.
If you read this and found it helpful please let me know.
Steph
