How to Focus Your Marketing Efforts

Marketing might not be your favourite activity, but without it, you’ll remain a well-kept secret.

Some practitioners don’t actively market themselves. They simply hope and wait for the phone to ring – this is basing the future success of your business on luck.

There are also the practitioners who try to do everything - jumping around from one marketing activity to another and feeling like nothing works. This group may be busy but they’re not making progress because they’re not doing anything properly. Marketing is a marathon and not a sprint - whatever activity you do will take time to mature, and for you to discover if it works for you.

Ultimately, you need to market yourself and you must be strategic about your approach if you want to minimise the energy it takes up. By understanding which marketing works best for you, you can make the most of your time and focus on the right things at the right time.

Make Peace with Marketing

Marketing plays many different roles in your business. At its core, marketing is about building relationships - it helps to maintain the connection with your existing clients as well as attract new ones. It’s where you demonstrate your expertise to a wider audience, helping them understand what you do, and is where you share your offers.

It takes time to understand what marketing is working for you but knowing this will help you to streamline your activities so you get to spend more time doing the work you love.

Here are 3 ways to understand where to focus your marketing efforts:

#1 How did you hear about me?

If you do nothing else, do this. “How did you hear about me?” is the question to ask every enquiry and every new client. Even ask existing clients this question if you don't know where they originally heard about you.

Track the answers you get, and you will soon start to build up a picture of where your clients are coming from. This information is priceless and will help you realise what marketing is working, what messages are resonating with your audience, and therefore where to focus your efforts.

#2 Why am I doing this activity?

Before you do any marketing, always ask yourself why you’re doing it. Who is your marketing for? Why is this activity important? What do I want to achieve from it?

Deciding on the goal for your marketing in advance will help you focus your efforts on the right things. It will also help you to lead people to take their next step with you whether that’s visiting your website, booking a discovery call, signing up to your email list, booking an appointment, or buying your products.

If you’re just blasting ‘stuff’ out there, it will keep you very busy, but you’re unlikely to get a good return on your time because your marketing isn’t strategic or considered.

#3 Understand Your Analytics

The number of different figures available from all the online platforms can be overwhelming. Tracking everything will become a chore, so keep it simple and identify which marketing activities are working for you.

Here are some ideas of what you can track:

• Email marketing - is your list growing? This can be a slow process especially when you’re starting out – you’ll be celebrating each new subscriber. Seeing growth month on month is a good indication you’re doing something right. 
  Open rates aren’t the best measure of interest since Apple affected them a couple of years ago with its 'Mail Privacy Protection' feature. But understanding which emails people interact with by clicking on a link in them, or replying to them is a great indicator of people who are interested in you and the work you do.
• Social media - Whilst the measures will vary on different platforms, you will find there are similarities between them. Get inquisitive about how well your posts are performing by looking at statistics about how many people see them and interact with, or share them. This will give you an idea of what platform is best for you and what type of posts are best for your audience.
• Website traffic - install Google Analytics on your website. It will show how many people visit, where they come from, and which pages are most popular.

Empowered Marketing

Becoming aware of what marketing is working will allow you to lean into what’s working and importantly, stop doing the things that don’t work.

If in doubt, think of the 80/20 rule. When it comes to your marketing, 80% of your success will come from 20% of your efforts. Identify the 20% that’s working and focus on those activities, and you’ll save yourself a heap of time.

You’re one person, use your time and energy wisely. Streamlining your marketing to only doing the things that count will make it more powerful and leave you with more time to do the things you love to do.

If you're struggling, let’s have a chat and I will help you get clear about your best next steps and point you in the right direction for the support you need.