How to approach marketing your self-employed business
The most important foundation for marketing and growing your business is setting a target for what you want to achieve, and a plan for how you intend to make it happen. You may already have a self-employed business plan in place, which will help you create your marketing strategy.
It doesn’t have to be massively detailed, or overly-ambitious. Even a very short and basic outline will help you to know if you’re working on something which should help your business grow, or if you’re possibly wasting your efforts.
The key elements are consciously choosing which channels you’re going to primarily focus on, the amount of new business you plan to gain from them, and the time you’re going to allow for it to happen. That gives you a way to check and assess whether a specific tactic is working for you, or not.
It’s easy to get caught up in marketing your business, especially investing lots of time on social media, or spending large amounts on producing video content. So, it’s important to know whether those efforts are generating any interest in your business, and being able to track whether it’s resulted in any revenue.
If something isn’t working, then it’s important to be honest with yourself and avoid falling into a sunk-cost fallacy, where you become reluctant to give up doing something after investing heavily in it, despite the fact it’s better to spend your time and money elsewhere.
Email marketing and newsletters
Just because the cost and ease of email marketing makes it possible to contact your mailing list on a constant basis doesn’t mean you should. It’s important to consider whether you’re sending the best information and offers to the right people, or if you might start to irritate them and end up deleted or relegated to spam folders.
It’s important to understand your obligations under the UK Data Protection Act 2018, and GDPR, along with any restrictions put in place by your email service provider, and for your email recipients in specific countries (for example, some retailers may find products can’t be offered for sale in other territories).
Around 2.4 billion emails get sent every second, with estimates for an average officer worker in the UK of around 121 messages arriving every day. And this can make it hard for you to stand out in a crowded inbox, and to get people to actually engage with your message. Checking open rates and unsubscribe numbers will help you understand what works for your business.
Accurate targeting can help you improve your response rates by ensuring that people only receive relevant offers, along with testing alternate subject lines, sending times and more. Most big email services such as Mailchimp, AWeber, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact and more offer easy ways to segment your mailing lists, use A/B testing and more.
Email newsletters have been a popular option for companies to build their mailing lists and update their audience on new content, offers and more. And there’s been a big resurgence in individuals and smaller businesses reaching people via their inbox rather than relying on social media, for example.
This can allow you to be more personal and informal, building a closer relationship with your email subscribers. The risk is that having an email due to go out on a schedule means you end up filling space with less interesting or useful content just to meet deadlines.
Public speaking and events
Meeting people and networking is an essential part of life for most business people. It’s also difficult to scale if you’re looking to grow more quickly. Building long-term personal relationships shouldn’t be overlooked, particularly if you offer high value products or services. But there are ways you can reach a larger audience through public speaking and events.
Not everyone will feel comfortable getting up in front of an audience, particularly for the first time. But speaking and presenting at events means you’re the centre of attention, and introduces you to everyone at once. And you don’t have to be the best presenter in the world to offer something useful or entertaining.
One big benefit is that people will feel more at ease approaching you after a talk, usually with relevant questions and enquiries. As a result, the conversations are likely to be more productive.
And there are a wide variety of smaller local meetups and events which offer a friendlier and more informal way to get experience of speaking and presenting, including IPSE local member meetups around the UK.
If you’d prefer to shine the spotlight on other people, another option is to begin hosting your own events. It’s easy to set up an IPSE local member meetup, or find potential speakers to talk about a subject, and by being the organiser, you get to meet and greet everyone.
And one-off events can often grow into regular meetups, building a new network of people in your area or industry that can bring a huge amount of value to all involved. Especially if you’re the person that brought everyone together.
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