With the fourth quarter of 2022 upon us already, I’m hearing a lot of fatigue and overwhelm from my clients at the moment. If you set goals at the beginning of the year, you’ll no doubt be looking at how on-track you are now to achieving them. Let me guess… you’re focusing on the things you didn’t do rather than celebrating the ones you did?
Managing it all is the single biggest issue for new business owners, especially if you’re also working a day job or running a household while trying to get your business off the ground.
I started 2022 with an intention to work in ‘flow’ this year. That has meant focusing on what naturally flows in my business – being present with clients, in-tune with my partners and listening to the market. It’s also meant inconsistencies in some channels – like email and social media. I learned that despite not being able to do it all, my business still boomed. I had three record months in a row, better (more committed) clients and more time outside of work to dedicate to a new relationship (something I’ve never really prioritised).
Starting or growing a business isn’t about doing it all. It’s about focusing on the things that matter the most. Doing fewer things really well and building on those over time.
The Marketing Collective programmes are extremely comprehensive. We take you on a deep-dive into yourself so you can intimately know your brand and all it represents. We teach you every marketing channel you need to start out – how to use it, how to measure it, how to optimise it. But, the intention is never for you to do it all. It’s to give you the grounding you need to know which are the most important marketing activities for your business – where the best places to reach customers are so you can focus your time and marketing dollars on nurturing them there.
My biggest tip to know where to focus?…
Start with your customer experience.
Customer Experience, or CX, is the feeling derived from encountering or engaging with your brand, at any stage in the customer journey. According to research by PWC, 73% of all people point to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions. Get it right and consumers will pay a premium (up to 16%) but get it wrong and you’ll erode all the brand good-will – one in three consumers (32%) say they will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience.
Having worked with businesses of all sizes – some of the world’s largest enterprises through to solopreneurs – I’m excited by what this means for small businesses…
You are more agile and often closer to your customers than your larger competitors. You are better placed to solve their needs and do so in a personal, more engaging manner. It takes years to connect corporate data, processes, departments and technologies to enable a seamless end-to-end CX within a corporate. This can be done in a matter of hours for a small business.
If you’re struggling to do all the things, please stop. Despite making marketing my career for over 20 years, I’m going to ask you this quarter to stop the marketing madness. It’s a controversial move given that most of the biggest consumerism events happen at this time of the year. To do less with more, you’ve got to know where to focus – which channels and content to prioritise.
And that starts with mapping out your customer experience.
Most corporates have this already mapped, but they struggle to deliver amidst all the internal complexities and politics. Most small businesses haven’t mapped it because they simply don’t know how. If that’s you, let me show you – follow my socials this month or sign up to my email list and I’ll take you through it step-by-step.
Map it before silly season kicks-in so you can leap frog those corporate competitors of yours and start 2023 already in flow!