Why you need a marketing strategy - and what won't happen for you without one

You need to understand your business goals and where you’re trying to get to.

You need to know who your audience is. You need to understand your target market.

You’ve probably heard this before, right?

Well, there’s a reason for that - an important one!

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You need to use that knowledge (of your audience, of your business goals) to make sure you’re focusing your efforts on the RIGHT things and to make sure you’re not wasting time on tactics that really don’t add VALUE for your business.

Marketing and social media in general can take up SO much of our time, and it’s beyond important to make sure we’re using the platforms that make sense for us.

We’ve all got influencers or people we look up to in our niche. You see what they’re doing and think to yourself: “I want me a bit of that!”

But it’s important not to try and copy and paste their strategy on to your business plans.

We’ve all got a slightly different offering and target audience, and what works them is not necessarily going to be what works for you. Take inspiration, absolutely!

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But don’t assume that they’ve got some magic formula which, when applied to your business, will automatically result in booked-out days and 5-figure months.

When you’re thinking about putting together a strategy for your business - whether for content, or pricing, or hiring - making sure that it feels true and authentic to you and your business values is THE most important starting point for success.

You are unique. Your strategy should be too.

So many business owners and entrepreneurs have a great idea - after all, that’s often what makes people follow this path in the first place - that they just know will be beneficial to the market, and they are SO excited and SO passionate about it that they just want to get it out there. Most entrepreneurs and small business owners don’t have experience from a business perspective of building marketing strategies.

So when you’re stepping in to running your own business it can be is really scary and overwhelming.

Without a strategy, essentially what you’re doing in your business is simply treading water. You might be taking action, sure, but you’re not following that mapped out path - the one that gets you where you want to be.

You might KNOW where you want to be. Hopefully you already have an idea in your head of where you want your business to get to, what you want it to look like, you’ve likely already got some goals related to things like income, reach or serving your clients.

However, without a strategy you just don’t have a clear route to GET THERE.

What you’re doing without a strategy is basically throwing everything at the wall and hoping to God something sticks.

This is an INSANE time waster. It takes a lot of time (so much timeeee) to invest in keeping up with social media channels. The lifespan of content, depending on the content, is short and getting SHORTER by the day! Your content has to be extremely eye catching and delivering kick-ass value for your audience to even notice it in their feed.

So if you don’t have a strategy and you don’t know where your focus should be, you’re probably trying to do everything. Does this feel familiar?

“OMG I need to tweet 5 times an hour and post on Facebook 5 times a day and then I need to take a really cool photo of my hipster latte for Insta….eeek!”

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Don’t forget, on top of that you’re trying to run your actual business! And unless you’re a professional marketing maven, you probably didn’t get into business to spend your days doing marketing and advertising activity. If that’s not your core thing, then that’s not what you want to spend all day doing - so DON’T. Build a strategy and get yourself really focused.

The mediums, channels and types of marketing content you use will depend massively on who you are, where you want to be and what your goal is - not to mention your audience demographics. Figuring all that out is a conversation for a different day.

Yes, there are for sure tried, tested and proven methods to using different platforms in the most effective way, but the special combination of these that you choose is going to be unique to you.

So to give yourself a fighting chance of getting your business where you want it to be and hitting those goals, build a strategy that is authentic to YOU - aligned to your business and aligned to your values.

Then go forth and kick-ass!

If you’re not sure where to start, and you want help figuring it all out, book a complimentary strategy call with me. I live and breathe this stuff!