If you run a small business and don’t have a marketing team, that means you are wearing lots of hats and not always focusing on the best way to grow your professional services.

Often that means you are focused more on the services you provide and not as much time to actually growing the business.

Here’s the reality…

If you are selling services, the #1 activity where you should be focusing:
90% of your time should be marketing and selling
10% of your time should be creating
The growth of your business does not come from creating but comes from the transactions.

Think marketing first! 

Here are ways you can get in front of your ideal audience starting with building awareness for who you are and what you solve for your ideal clients. 

Awareness phase:

  1. Speaking – this is a great way to share your message as long as you are speaking to people who are your ideal clients.
  2. Workshops – free workshops are a great way to have people experience you and your work
  3. Marketing Materials – can be effective but the key is follow-up
  4. Social Media – be sure you have a strategy rather than posting things that are random. Know you target audience and post content relevant to them
  5. Social Media Engagement – choose 1 or 2 social platform where your ideal clients are also active and make your goal to engage with other people’s content, engagement is key in establishing community and long-term relationships
  6. Give away free content – this can be gated content (meaning they need to give you an email address to get the content) or ungated.  This give people a way to experience your expertise
  7. Advertising free content – as in #6, you would advertise to your target audience with an offer to receive gated content while building your email list.
  8. Referrals – this is a way to make others aware of you through a mutual connection or warm lead.

Trust phase:  People do business with those they trust, your goal is trust building.

  1. Follow-up with people who heard you speak or attended your workshop with additional ways they can learn more from you.  This is the next step to building trust now that they are aware of who you are.
  2. Invite people who have met you in the awareness phase to a short conversation via phone, online or in-person with the goal to further get to know the person. Find out about them and their challenges before offering yourself as a solution. You could consider this also the discovery phase if you were not able to learn about the person individually through the awareness phase.
  3. First, look for ways to add value to your prospects, this builds trust.  Who can you connect them with as an example.
  4. Build trust & credibility through content:  webinar trainings, social media content, white papers/free give-a-ways, video, podcast interviews, etc.

Make an offer:

  1. Once people are aware of you because you’ve built trust and credibility, you want to make them an offer to take the next step with you.  Your goal with the offer is to solve their problems, give them results.

Want to make more money?  Make more offers.

Too often creatives and anyone in a service-based business are focused on refining, creating, consuming, tweaking, continually asking for feedback, holding the story of ‘perfectionism,’ and no asking for the sale.  Don’t let that be you.

When you’re NOT asking for the sale, you don’t have the resources (MONEY) that will give you the time and space to do more creating.

Need more tips to grow your business?  Contact me for a complimentary consultation – joanne@marketingdish.com