As you grow your business, you will start to realize a few things. First, you will realize all that time you had in the beginning stages of your business to create gorgeous brochures and spend hours on your website copy and layout have gone by the wayside. You will also start to realize that you should always be marketing yourself. Because if you aren’t showing up when you are booked out for months, you will not stay that way. So no matter how “busy” you are, you should always find time to market. To help you be more efficient, I present 5 ways to improve your marketing – NOW.
01. Improve Your SEO
If you don’t have a search engine optimization program running in the background, invest in one now. Yoast is a free WordPress plugin and will guide you through setting your website up correctly for search engine optimization. Why is search engine optimization helpful? Because when potential clients are looking for answers, you can provide, the first thing they do is to run a search. If your website is optimized, you will show up higher and higher in the search results. While you can pay services to do this, spending a few hours over the course of a month will do wonders for your ranking.
02. Link, Link, Link
In your email signature, on your Facebook and other social media profiles, everywhere you show up personally, link your website. Or even a favorite blog post. If you don’t have a website, link your LinkedIn profile or Facebook Page. And make sure wherever you link people to, you give them information that pertains to your ideal client. I have my Instagram bio link connected to an opt-in, and even my personal email account has a link to my website. I *have* gotten clients from people just clicking on my email signature. Make all those emails you send daily work for you.
03. Share Your Knowledge
If you find you are explaining the same thing over and over to people, if you are having the same conversations about your zone of genius, then create a blog post or video about it. I do tons of screen share tutorials for things I could probably do in my sleep, but most people just don’t know. I create a quick video on it (I use Loom – free and easy!) and pop it into my website; then whenever someone asks a question about that topic, I share a link to my blog post or video. It took me all of 10 minutes to record, add to a blog (while updating my SEO for that page!), and now I have a place to send people for that information. Nicely contained on my website with calls to action, explanations of who I am and so on. Marketing made easy!
04. Show Up
This one seems simple to start but can get more difficult as you grow your business. Never, ever, underestimate the power of just showing up. Show up to networking events, join conversations in Facebook groups where your target audience hangs out, answer questions for friends and peers that relate to your zone of genius, make guest appearances on blogs, podcasts, and so on. Make an effort every day to show up in some way, even for 10 minutes in your busy schedule; you will be surprised how quickly you see results.
05. Track your effectiveness
This one is super simple but also helps you see where you should be putting the bulk of your energy in marketing. You should track your leads. If you have opt-ins, you should monitor where people are coming from when they opt-in. If you are dropping links in groups to your blog or website, you can use link tracking software like bit.ly to see where those clicks are coming from. If you have a lead capture on your site, are you asking how the leads found you? Start to use tracking protocol to see where your leads are coming from, so you know where your effort is paying off.
While there are thousands of strategies to help you market your business, I know these five tactics will have an immediate impact on your marketing!