Try “Micro Marketing Plans” This Summer!

This is bite sized, easy, simple, but also really intentional and strategic to help guide you in making decisions that you can then scale up or double down on in the future when it comes to the way that you market and promote yourself and your business.

This is the Entrepreneur School podcast where we believe you can run a thriving business and still make your family a priority. This show is all about supporting you the emerging or early stage Entrepreneur on your journey from solopreneur to CEO while wearing all of the other hats in your life. My name is Kelly Sinclair and I'm a brand and marketing strategist who started a business with two kids under 3am, a corporate PR girl turned entrepreneur after I learned the hard way that life is too short to waste doing things that burn you out. On this show, you'll hear inspiring stories from other business owners on their journey, and learn strategies to help you grow a profitable business while making it all fit into the life that you want. Welcome to Entrepreneur School.

I was just thinking about how I introduced this episode. And it occurred to me to just say, this is going to be short and sweet. Because the whole point here is it's summertime, and you only have little pockets of time to work within right now, probably because either your kids are home, you're driving to summer camps, you're heading out on holiday, or you just want to get out in your garden or sit in the sun and have a long lunch, and maybe enjoy, you know, a cocktail on the patio on a Tuesday at whatever time. It's fine. I get it. And I want to really support you through the summer in keeping your momentum going. You know, this is what I'm all about. We talk about this so much momentum is so important, because it's really challenging to get it back when you let go of it. So how do we continue to keep building this over the summer in a time where we maybe don't want to do things as much.

Now this strategy that I'm going to share with you in the episode today, you can apply this at any time of the year. I do it all year, all the time, it's now just become like a full on habit for me. And I'm going to call this micro marketing plans. So this is bite sized, easy, simple, but also really intentional and strategic to help guide you in making decisions that you can then scale up or double down on in the future when it comes to the way that you market and promote yourself and your business. So let's just zoom out for a second. Since we're talking micro, let's zoom out to the bigger picture for a minute. When it comes to marketing plans. What do I even mean like what goes into marketing plan. Now when I do marketing plans for clients, they are usually like full blown, long term works of art, if I may. And so they include things like goals like organizational business goals, how you're going to support those with marketing and communications. It integrates a variety of strategies that are going to support and build on each other while contributing to these larger goals. It would lay out like the timing of things in order to make sure that those are boosting and supporting your sales cycles offers that you want to create launches that you might have planned to those kinds of things all tie up in a lovely little bow in a marketing plan. And so when you can't think about the bigger picture, or long term right now are you maybe are in a position where you're trying to evaluate what's the best next step. But you don't want to lose momentum. And you want to continue to build your audience so that you have people to engage with as well as eventually to sell to so that they can become your clients, then what do you do, right? So I just want to underlie this too, with the fact that marketing is an experiment, always. But it doesn't have to be throwing spaghetti at the wall, it should really be intentional and inform your longer term decisions. So when you do these micro marketing plans, you're doing a small thing at a time so that you get to implement that you get to like decide what it is implement and evaluate the results from those things right away. So those are sort of the three steps. What am I going to do? Let's do it. How did it work? And like little pieces at a time rather than the longer term strategy. So we're not talking about anything here. That would take a super long time to evaluate the effectiveness. And they're not always going to be super effective for every piece of the puzzle. As far as like when we talk about marketing goals, our goals are to increase our audience to build brand awareness to ultimately make sales. So you might not be doing all three of those things with one, individual marketing action, but you're contributing to one of them. And how is that working? So I'm going to give you examples for sure. So don't worry, stick with me for a second. I do just also want to say, these are all my feelings about marketing right now.

Marketing is great. There are so many different strategies that you can use, which is why it's overwhelming, right? This is like, how do I decide what I should do? Should I go to events? Should I be doing ads? Should I be participating in certain things? Should I speak? Should I get on podcast? I start my own podcast do I need to worry about SEO, bla bla, bla, bla bla? And here's the truth, all of them work? And also, a lot of them don't work? But how do you know? And how do you decide.

And so I have four questions for you, that you can ask yourself to help choose what type of marketing strategies to use. And these are also they apply to both the big picture marketing strategies, and your micro marketing strategies that you're going to try over the next few weeks, or the summer, or whenever you're listening to this whenever you need a reboost and reset when it comes to marketing.

Number one, who is your audience, this is the most important thing in any kind of endeavor, we need to know who we are talking to, because that is going to determine so many factors, it's going to help us figure out where we can find them. gonna help us figure out what we need to say, how do we meet them? where they're at? What are they doing? What are they thinking, what are they feeling? What are they struggling with? How can we connect with them in that way?

The second question is, where are they actively looking for the kind of help that you provide? So where are they shopping? Where are they searching? What Facebook groups? are they typing in their questions and looking for the services that you have? Who's referring? Who do they trust? How do they find out information? Where are they looking for it like, I've just feel like I'm making a really weird example. But imagine someone's just walking down the street, they're just walking down the street, right now, they're not actively looking for your coaching service. Right. So it's like it would be a little bit out of left field to try and hit them with a message about that right now. So versus somebody is in a business group, in a networking group, and you go there and you meet them, and they're already thinking about it, they're asking about it, they're looking for information, they're looking for people to refer them to a coach, much better fit, much better likelihood of success as well.

So number three, is what marketing strategies are in alignment with your strengths. This one, I think it's so important, I want to empower you to only do things that feel good for you that come a little bit easy, easiest, good, easy means that your energy is going to be great that you're not going to be frustrated that you're not going to come across awkwardly because you actually feel good about this. So we know like speaking and podcasting, and doing trainings and things like that can be a really, really powerful way for you to build a reputation to build authority to build your expertise. But if that makes you want to vomit, and you're not there yet, then you don't have to do that. There's other ways there's more intimate settings that you can make those same kinds of connections, establish that same level of authority and expertise, as in a more public platform. It's okay, you don't have to do it. I think this is what frustrates me when I see people like waving the flag for their favorite thing that they're trying to teach people. It's like it doesn't work for everybody, and it won't. So knowing what's in alignment for you with your strengths is one of the first steps to know which direction to go and lean into and then expand upon.

So the fourth and last question to ask yourself when you're trying to choose the marketing strategy is how do you show up as your most authentic self so that you can attract the right people? So this is a kind of another step of that strengths conversation. Where do you feel like really in alignment and good because there are parts of marketing that cannot be explained except for your energy is not right. You're putting people off putting people I've read about attracting the right people, because something is like, just not aligning and not working. So how do you feel super good? Like, do you feel awesome, walking into a room full of strangers, and then making it a goal to meet people and connect, so you love going to conferences and networking events and things like that? Or does that make you so uncomfortable. And then you are so kind of hiding in the corner with the two people that you already know, or you have too many drinks, because you're nervous, or whatever it is, right? Like think about those things, what's actually going to be supportive for you. What's going to feel simple. And this is the whole point, when we're talking about micro marketing plans for summer, it has to feel like kind of an easy, check off the box, and do it and then see how it went. Rather than like, if you are building this up in your head, like it's going to be so hard and challenging, then it will be. So let's not do that. So permission to like, choose what seems easy, because it feels good. And it helps keep you at that level of confidence. That is really what is the attractive feature, and what attracts people to you, and allows you to make those connections which lead to where you want them to go, which is to people becoming clients and working with you.

So I'm encouraging you to try out micro marketing plans for the summer, which is getting you experimenting with new strategies, low risk, potentially huge reward actually. So here's some examples. And I've talked about this before, but last summer is when I invented my visibility tour method. And I challenged myself to make sure that, you know, most days when I wasn't doing something with my kids or out on my paddleboard or whatnot, I was making sure I was making at least one connection or trying one way of putting myself out there. And I discovered bundles. I had a guest on recently Kylie Kelly, she's like the queen of doing bundles for email list growth. And I was like, Oh, this is an interesting idea. I contribute a digital product, I basically had to fill out a form, it took me about 30 minutes, I committed to sharing about the bundle one time, that's basically the deal when you're a contributor. And it resulted me in welcoming 167 email subscribers in one week, which was mind blowing, because I had never had that amount of growth in such a short period of time. So I was like, Okay, let's do this again. So I did another one, a couple of weeks later, and I got 561 email subscribers, I just wouldn't look these up over the course of like the couple of weeks that people can join through. And I was just amazed. So now this is I was like this works. I tried it, it was small was a micro action. And it works. So now I make sure I'm doing one or two per month, that's helping me consistently attract new subscribers. And that is no cost. So I'm not interested in doing ads. I don't want to pay for my leads. This is something that allows me to bring people into my world and have connection and conversation and see where that goes.

So back to the beginning where I was saying you can sometimes only evaluate one piece of it. Does it work for audience lead generation? Yes. Does it work for sales? Not so much. Like I'm not making sales off of that, and immediately, right, so that's a longer term piece to evaluate later. But that is still a really effective important part because we need an audience in order to make sales. So if I wasn't making creating an audience, I also wouldn't be making sales. So I might as well be growing my audience, right.

So if you want to figure out what the best marketing strategies are for you, you can do it systematically over the summer without spending all of your time working on your business. Because I get it we want to like just lean back a little bit, but still not in depth in September, where we're trying to figure out like, what's on my calendar and starting to schedule things and starting to put things into place. Some of these things can take a few weeks of preparation or your I've got some bundles and summits and things on my calendar already for October. I've recorded podcasts that are going out later in the year. Those kinds of things like need to be done in advance. So staying on top of it will always always net you a win So I decided that I wanted to create a container to support you with this. And I'm still talking about it. Because it doesn't matter what time of the summer, you're listening to this, we're doing this weekly, it's going to support you, even if you do a few weeks of it. It'll help kickstart you back into the fall so that you're going to be ready to go and having those opportunities built out. So my invitation is that you join me in the summer visibility challenge. And I'm going to be there live every week to support you with your own micro marketing plans, coming up with the ideas, what should you do, how do you implement it? And actually basically being right there while you do it. So what does it look like it's weekly accountability calls, we're running all the way through September the ninth because that's still summer, the first couple of weeks some school with the kids is crazy zone. So we're California calling that summer, it's 30 minutes a week. And it's really get down to business and ensure that you're putting yourself out there in the most strategic ways.

I also have a plug and play visibility calendar for you where I have inserted over 30 proven strategies that you can use right away. And they really do take like 10 minutes a day. So reaching out to somebody and making a connection is so important, so powerful, and so much more effective use of your time than trying to rewrite your website or even worrying about your social media copy and posting all summer long. And then I also have a q&a fi to make sure that you're you know, getting your questions answered. If you're implementing something and you want a little bit of feedback, um, you submit your questions, and I'm going to record the answers to those to keep your momentum going all summer long.

So the summer visibility challenge is your roadmap for staying top of mind and growing an audience of ideal clients. While working your laid back summer schedule. I'm here for it. I'm so excited about it. And I can't wait to see you inside, you can visit ksco.ca/challenge to get signed up. The investment is $197. For two months, it is a no brainer. It is like so much support, keeping you going keeping you on track and probably helping you learn new strategies that you maybe never have even tried before and giving you the support to feel confident to move forward with those. So I'm pumped about this. I can't wait to see you there. I hope that you are going to work on micro marketing plans this summer. And I would love to be there to do it with you. Bye for now.

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