Welcome to the third and final episode of my Marketing for Small Business miniseries!
In the first installment, we talked about Small Business Marketing 101: How to Get Started from Ground Zero. You can go back and read the post or give the episode a listen if you’re in the beginning stages of entrepreneurship!
Last week’s episode covered the middle, aka the “teen phase” of marketing your small business and what it should look like to gain traction and build marketing systems. Head over to the post or listen to the episode, How to Avoid Burnout in Marketing Your Small Business, to gather these key insights.
We wrap up the miniseries today by discussing what the final small business marketing milestones look like. I give details about what the end game in marketing can be, and what to strive for if you’re not there yet. You won’t want to miss these crucial action points for a thriving small business! Click the player below to listen to the episode.
Table of Contents
The Final Countdown? (Of Marketing Your Business, At Least!)
Maybe you have gotten into a rhythm as far as marketing your small business goes.
Maybe you’re finally past that intense initial stage. You’re past setting up your systems. You kind of know what works and what doesn’t.
You’ve even passed on some other tasks to someone else. You’ve hired someone else to do some other task. Maybe you hired a web developer, web designer, a copywriter for your website, and that’s all taken care of. Maybe you’ve hired a social media manager for your Facebook page or TikTok account.
Congrats!
Now you’ve reached sort of this maturity stage of marketing your small business. Your business’ marketing is all grown up and ready to move into his college dorm room.
This is a good place to be, and most people don’t even get there because they get too overwhelmed in the initial stages. It becomes too much for them.
(And if you’re not there yet, that’s okay too! You can take this information, remember it and look ahead to the goals you want to achieve.)
Getting Your Marketing Working for You
If your marketing starts to work for you I’m not saying that you’ll never pick up your phone and add a post or a reel or a story, but it won’t be consuming to you anymore. It shouldn’t be at this point.
You should be past the initial intense phase where you’ve poured a lot of time, energy and possibly money into setting things up and getting traction. That’s fine– I encourage intensity in the beginning, but that’s not a place that you want to stay in. It’s not a way to thrive in your business and keep it going.
How does your marketing work for you?
Either you have hired someone else who has the skills to be able to do this for you, or you can set up systems.
Batching content is a common system that creators use if you are the only one manning this operation for now. That means take one stretch of time to batch similar tasks together.
Visuals in marketing
Let’s say you market primarily through a website.
You could make sure that you get all of your images ready to go on the same day. You could take product photos, you edit them, you create captions and alt descriptions for your website and you upload them to the website. There are so many tasks that have to do with images, but if you did them all at the same time, this is creating a system and is more effective.
The same goes for visuals on Instagram and Pinterest, YouTube thumbnails, LinkedIn post covers, etc.
Writing-based marketing
Or let’s say you rely on a lot of text-based marketing, such as blog posts or even mini essays. (Some people call them atomic essays, like on LinkedIn.)
If you have a very words-based or text-based approach to marketing, you could try to write all of your posts and essays on the same day and batch it.
Yes, it would really exercise your writing brain. Don’t be afraid to utilize all the tools available to you, like ChatGPT, to help you brainstorm. You can type in certain prompts that AI help you think through. Maybe AI can help you come up with an outline.
(I wouldn’t suggest having AI write everything, because I think people can see through that, but it’s great for bouncing ideas off of and helping you really clarify what you’re going for.)
Video-based marketing
If your marketing content is more video-based– let’s say you’re a YouTuber or you heavily rely on Instagram Reels– you could film all of your content in one day.
I’ve seen YouTubers talk about this and they talk about, you know, having different outfits, ready even to switch outfits. Though it sounds weird at first, it is truly more efficient to do all of that type of task, like filming, in one day. Save editing for a different day.
Batching tasks is one of the easiest content creation systems you can implement if it’s just you starting out.
Using Content Templates as a Marketing System
Another marketing system that will propel you to the end game is using templates.
When I helped my church with their social media, we decided that we would do like a verse post at the beginning of the week, every week, and then we would do two reels per week. We came up with recurring content types until it was like filling in blanks.
When it came to content planning, it made things go really fast and simplified things. Once you set them this kind of system up, it’s almost self-running.
Creating a business website is another example of a content template system.
Once you’ve done the heavy lifting (or hired someone to!) of writing your basic home, about, products/services and contact pages, you have all of the necessities. Then you can focus on increasing your rankings on the search engines and increasing customer awareness through periodically adding new blog posts. (Writing blog posts can be hired out as well!)
I love things that keep working for me once I’ve set them up, with little maintenance. A good website is one of these generally self-running assets. After the initial set-up phase, you’ll still need to put in the work or hire someone to maintain it, but the bulk of the work is over.
Reaching the Maturity Phase of Marketing Your Small Business
You’ve reached the mature stage of marketing your small business if your marketing is working for you and not the other way around.
This doesn’t mean that by this point, you never put forth any effort into marketing, but it just means that you’re not totally consumed and overwhelmed by it, that things are pretty well self-running.
Let’s say, for example, you might want to get involved in marketing from time to time. That’s fine. Some business owners like picking up their phone at a spontaneous moment and recording a story to share on Instagram as just a fun addition to their life.
Even with an occasional post or video, it shouldn’t at this point be overwhelming to you as the business owner. If it is, go back to the last episode where I give some ideas and pointers on how to kind of make it out of the survival phase and to a more sustainable phase.
The second characteristic of being in this mature small business marketing phase is that, as you’ve been working to set up all of these marketing systems, you have hired someone or even a team to help you take care of marketing.
That’s just one big piece to the puzzle. It keeps your arms open to handle more of the business operations side.
Reputation Building: A Benefit of a Mature Business
Another crucial marketing piece working in your favor at this point is this invisible thing that keeps on building.
That is your reputation. Your reputation, and just the word of mouth locally, will continue to build with time as you keep doing what you do, as you keep working in this business.
It’s kind of the great thing. It can be a good thing and a bad thing, because when you first get started, your reputation is zero, and that’s why there’s so much intensity required.
When you start marketing, you have to really throw everything at it, because no one knows what you do or sell, so you really need to get that megaphone out and tell the world.
But the cool thing is that through time, as you continue working in that area, selling that product, more and more people– without you necessarily knowing who– are finding out about your business.
Word of mouth can happen behind your back, and not in a bad way.
It’s this invisible compounding effect that works in your favor. If you are doing good work and a good job, then a matching good repuration should be compounding. It’s sort of like if you put your money in a really good stock– it just grows and grows. That’s what building a good reputation for your business is. And then you’re really mature when you’ve been in the same business for 20, 30, 40 years and that’s basically all you need.
Reputation does take time to build, but as you’re doing the good work you want to do anyways, it becomes almost this nice, effortless byproduct.
But the key ingredient here is time. It’ll take a lot of work initially before you create marketing systems, hire marketing contractors or staff, and build your business reputation. But that’s what we’re striving for here. You’ll know your business promotion is on the right track if you start to achieve these milestones.
Best of luck to my fellow small business owners out there, whatever stage of marketing you may find yourselves in.
Need to off-load some of your marketing responsibilities? From copywriting for your website to optimizing your social profiles to creating content strategy, I’m here for you at Effective Media by Charmaine. Pop by my service page for more details or fill out a contact form to get in touch.
Thanks for joining in on the (Mostly) Stay-at-Home Mom podcast! Be sure to subscribe on either Apple Podcasts or Spotify to get the latest episode. You can also catch the episodes with one click back to the homepage of this site, where there’s a player full of each program. Until next time!