If you’re anything like me or the small business owners I work with, marketing your business can feel like a necessary evil.
It definitely felt this way in the early years of my business. On many days, marketing felt like a whole other job on top of the work I really wanted to do in my business. I felt like I was never doing enough marketing, and that I didn’t even really know what I was supposed to be doing.
A lot has changed for me since this those early days. These days, my marketing feels like an organic part of my business. It feels intentional and no longer overwhelming—it even feels joyful.
In this post, I share 3 of my favourite strategies for more intentional and effective small business marketing with you (and by taking the free quiz you’ll discover which strategies fit you and your business best).
Strategy #1: Give yourself permission to focus
Sometimes, when small business owners tell me about which platforms they’re using to market their business, my heart sinks. They are everywhere: on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, on YouTube and TikTok, and send a regular newsletter too.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with being on a lot of marketing platforms. But if you’re like many of the small business owners, freelancers and creatives I work with, you feel easily overwhelmed by keeping up with a lot of channels. You might be introverted, craving a slower and gentler way of marketing, without feeling like you need to be ‘on’ all the time. Or you might simply be running your business by yourself, perhaps next to another job, care responsibilities or a chronic condition or illness. You simply do not have the time or energy to be on all the platforms.
This is your business, and you get to call the shots.
And yet you might feel like you have to. If we listen to the marketing gurus, we might start believing that if we’re not on Instagram, we can never run a thriving business. If we’re not on YouTube, we’re missing out on loads of potential clients and customers. If we’re not on TikTok, BlueSky, Mastodon or whatever the hip new platform might be, we’re being foolish, not acting like serious business owners should.
But here’s the thing: this is your business, and you get to call the shots. As a small business owner or solopreneur, you will by default have to make choices about your marketing. You don’t have millions to spend on marketing, or a marketing department to do the marketing for you. You need to choose if you want to market effectively, intentionally and without driving yourself insane.
This is my permission slip for you to stop spreading yourself thin.
So this is my permission slip for you to stop spreading yourself thin, and to focus instead on those platforms and channels that feel most aligned with your life and your business. That can mean leaving social media, or pausing your podcast. It can mean marketing on three rather than six, or nine, channels. And I promise you that it will mean feeling so much calmer and intentional about your marketing.
Strategy #2: What can you make work harder?
When I radically changed my marketing in 2021, I didn’t just give myself permission to focus on a minimal number of channels and platforms. I also made my marketing more effective and intentional—and more manageable—by asking myself which part of my marketing I could make harder.
My newsletter is my absolute favourite part of my marketing. I love writing, I love creating community around my business and connecting with readers. In the summer of 2021 I had a small list of under 200 subscribers. Making the newsletter work harder, and becoming more intentional and focused about it, is one of the reasons why my list is now over 10 times bigger than it was in 2021.
This is what making my newsletter work harder looks like:
- mention my newsletter and how to sign up in more places: in social media bios when I was still on social media, for example;
- make it much easier for people to sign up on my website: through a pop-up, a clear menu item and a sign-up form in the footer;
- adding a link to my newsletter in my email signature;
- repurpose old newsletters by uploading them to my blog as blog posts, and pinning these to Pinterest;
- adding a sign-up banner near the top of each blogpost prompting readers to sign up to my newsletter for more like this;
- clarify my newsletter’s one-liner, i.e. what the newsletter offers, and making this very specific in sign-up forms and on my website;
- rewriting my welcome email, to truly welcome new readers into my world, through links to my favourite resources, a little bit about me and links to favourite newsletter posts.
I can’t tell you how spacious, intentional and effective my marketing now feels. Marketing no longer feels like a necessary evil, or a whole separate job that I have to do. It feels like an organic part of my business, rooted in my business and thereby easeful.
This is exactly what I support small business owners, freelancers and creatives like you with in my marketing programme Grow. Grow helps you to grow your business with gentle and intentional marketing, at your pace, suited to your life and business, with or without social media.
Strategy #3: Repurpose
My favourite part of my marketing strategy is how I repurpose my newsletters into blogposts and Pinterest pins, bringing more people to my work through SEO and Pinterest. Not only is this really effective, both blogposts/SEO and Pinterest are the kinds of slow and gentle forms of marketing I love, that don’t require me to be ‘on’.
Another way of repurposing your content would be to turn a podcast episode into a blogposts and pins, or perhaps into a series of social media posts. Or you can turn your newsletter into a series of social media posts.
Repurposing content is really effective, but you need to focus too.
However, when I help people see where they can repurpose their content—for instance in my marketing programme Grow—I always remind them to keep focusing as well. Repurposing doesn’t mean that you should still be on all the channels just because you have the content already. Uploading newsletters to my blog and creating pins for them takes time and energy (which in 2023 I began to outsource to Laura McMahon of The Smallest Light). If you turn your newsletter or YouTube video into social media posts, it takes time and energy to put the content into a different format—and to reply and engage with audiences on social media.
Repurposing is an incredibly effective way of marketing, but make sure to stay intentional too without spreading yourself thin.
If you’re in need of more inspiration for your small business marketing, do check out the quiz I created, which will help you discover which of my favourite 7 marketing strategies best fits your life and your business.
And I’d love for you to check out Grow as well, my hybrid marketing programme helping you build the slow, gentle and profitable business you crave with intentional and confident marketing.
Please feel free to share this post it with business friends, in your newsletter or elsewhere. 💛
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