By Taking The Route To Innovate.
Do you suffer from the cycle of feast & famine in your business? If you’re not familiar with this phrase, then let me explain: it refers to lots of work or sales all at once followed by leaner periods, where it can be hard to balance the books, both financially or metaphorically. So, how can you escape this pattern or prevent it from happening at all?
The first thing to know about the so-called feast or famine problem, is that it isn’t even a problem. It’s a symptom. A symptom of a marketing problem. The only way to break this cycle is to innovate, to review your marketing approach & do something different.
It’s really tempting to get into a routine that works & to stay there. For small business owners, we are expected to wear so many different hats & therefore it is easy to find a process that works for a particular part of your business & then stick to it, even when it is not delivering the best outcomes. You find a way to manage your time, resources & pennies to get the most out of social media, to keep your bookkeeping up to date, to elevate your brand awareness, to get your quotes out to prospective customers, to deliver your product or service, to invoice customers & manage the credit control that comes with late payments & finally to get yourself out from behind your desk to go networking. Formularising what you do & making it prescriptive might seem like the best option. After all, you’ve got your business routine, it’s working OK & everything seems to be streamlined. So, why innovate when this will only rock the boat?
When you decided to become a business owner you probably walked away from the corporate world & a monthly pay cheque. You rocked your boat then! When you made your first batch of products or someone bought your services for the first time, you had already taken the leap from regular citizen to entrepreneur. You had definitely stepped out of your working comfort zone, & that action itself rocked the boat. So, you’re already a boat rocker!
In this blog, we’re going to explore a few ways you can freshen up your business with minimal boat rocking. But why should I do things differently? In today’s competitive business landscape, where sectors are crowded, we heavily rely on innovation to stay ahead of our competitors1. But to innovate you also need to be creative. While creativity is crucial to generate ideas that are both unique & original, they’re not always inherently useful. Innovative solutions can’t exist, however, without a component of creativity2. As a small business owner, you can balance your creativity & your innovative approach against your time-honoured routines to ensure your innovations are deliverable & of value.
Some of these suggestions can be implemented right now, from whatever device you’re reading this on! Innovating within your business might sound daunting, but you likely already have all the tools you need to shake things up.
Look How Far You Have Already Come
As we move into the summer of 2022, just look at how the landscape of the small business owner has changed. How many of you would have been comfortable having meetings virtually? I know I certainly wasn’t. This change was forced upon us by circumstances beyond our control & It is true that not everyone moved to a virtual format to become comfortable using the likes of Teams, Zoom or Remo. Those business owners who embraced the change (& innovated in their businesses to seize the opportunity) thrived & have started 2022 in a stronger position than they were in March 2020, when the pandemic started.
Loosen Up
Marketing has evolved a lot; things use to be so serious. The advent of social media means each of us can find our own marketing voice. Small business owners generally buy from other small business owners they like, know & trust. How do you build trust? At the heart of trust is authenticity.
Very few of us like to be sold at, we all tend to skip through the adverts on demand or go our & make a cup of tea on terrestrial TV. Admittedly, TV advertising is an avenue that’s not accessible for most small business owners, but the power of video & authenticity can be seen here. Let’s look at John Lewis, who run a Christmas TV advertising campaign that is always much anticipated. In their 2013 campaign; The Bear & The Hare, they are working to elicit an emotional response to demonstrate that the John Lewis brand understands the values of their customers at Christmas time. The same can be said of their 2019 campaign: Edgar The Dragon – Show Them How Much You Care. In neither advert is there any reference made to products for sale, although in the in the Edgar advert, John Lewis & Waitrose have cleverly place product that you could buy from them. The powerful emotional response both adverts create only goes to heighten & strengthen the John Lewis brands’ values & the underlying messages that resonate with their core audiences’ values
How can you, as a small business owner create something similar to John Lewis? It is not about budget or lots of fancy videography kit. It is all about authenticity. Video is a creative way to innovate your marketing.
Making your own video can be as complicated as you want to make it. But the more complex you try to make the end product the less likely you are to actually create a video in the first place. So, let’s keep it simple. Use your smartphone to record a video. Tell people something they need to know. I often hear business owners say “my sector is boring”. The sad truth behind this is that if you say this then you will believe it, so steer well clear of this kind of thinking. All sectors can be “sexy”, you just have to find the components of your business that you find exciting & share that with your audience. Don’t try to be something that you are not. If you aren’t naturally quick witted & instantly funny, don’t try to be humorous, if this isn’t your natural style, by trying to be comical you are not being authentic. Smile when you speak, ask a question of your audience & then answer the question concisely & in context. Always end with your branding & contact details.
Vidyard: Simply Powerful Video!
If all of this seems a bit daunting why not take a leaf out of my book. I have innovated this year & started to use video for simple messaging. I use Vidyard to send personalised messages on LinkedIn & via email to my new contacts.
Vidyard is a Chrome extension & is a straightforward way to communicate using video. For me it is proving to be a really powerful way to engage with potential customers. With Business Buzz networking at the heart of my business the way I build relationships & the value I place in the people with whom I do business is fundamental to my marketing. Therefore, Vidyard helps me to be authentic. It allows me to build relationships quickly, to showcase my personality (that is so much a key element in my personal brand) & is a terrific way to introduce both myself & Business Buzz to both new & existing contacts.
Add a Newsletter to Your Routine
If you have a website or the capability to collect email addresses, you can stay in touch with your customers by sending out a monthly newsletter. Services like Mailchimp provide ready-made templates or customizable ones that you can use to get your messages out easily, without having to send hundreds of emails one address at a time. By making a move to an application like Mailchimp you’re innovating!
What should you write about in this newsletter? Anything! You can use this newsletter to announce new locations, new team members, have a product or service spotlight, updates about what you’re are working on or new product launches; you can basically use it as a quick platform to say “Hey, I’m here, my stuff is here, and I want to connect with you”. Sprinkle in a few links to your social media to encourage readers to keep up with you outside of the newsletter, and now you’ve created a way to reach people you might not have reached before. By pulling all of your marketing closer, to make it more coherent & more interconnected you have innovated!
Become Canvafabulous
To support you in being more coherent invest in a Canva subscription, the accessible graphic design platform. For a little over £99.993 you can have access to a vast array of potential collateral that can be used to enhance your brand & express your personal & brand values. My top tip for using Canva is to think about less words & to make eye catching images the focus of your efforts. Use available text in LinkedIn or Facebook or your mailshot to explain your message. You want people to stop as they scroll, so it’s all about the image or the video associated with your message.
As a small business owner, it can be expensive to keep asking your Graphic Designer to get your on-going marketing artwork & other materials prepared. Get your designer to give you PNG & JPEG versions of your logo & other branding elements as well as the HEX, CMYK & RGB numbers for your brand colourways, so that you can use them in Canva to create your own artwork.
Where to start? Canva has thousands of templates which are an ideal starting place. Pick one & adapt it & use the same format over & over. Change the underlying pictures to create new pieces of artwork. What is important is to ensure that you are brand consistent. Make sure your logo is always shown, where appropriate your headshot & always use your brands colourways. What you create in Canva can be used & then repurposed for all of your marketing needs. You can find something for every occasion, for every sector & for every business in Canva.
Do a Realistic Inventory of What’s Working
Not every solution is going to be a hit. It doesn’t mean you’re making bad decisions. It probably means you are not targeting your audience in the places that they hangout. Knowing who your true customers are & where they can be found is a key component for any business owner to understand, but often this is over looked, as we dive into the many aspects of setting up a business.
You probably already have a method of keeping track of which of your products or services is selling & what’s not (if you don’t, you really should). But do you keep track of the impact your marketing is having on your business? One of the first habits you should establish is to ask your new customers ‘how they heard about you & how they heard about what you do’. If you use business networking to raise awareness of who you are & what you do, then you should be looking for introductions & referrals. If you use more traditional print methods to get your brand out there, then you need to know from which publication you are found. Lastly, if social media is an important part of your campaigns then you should be checking Google, Twitter & Facebook analytics to know your reach & engagement.
Constantly review your outcomes. If you are not getting the introductions from networking you are expecting, then may be the events you are visiting are not right for you or for your product or service. More likely, is that your messaging & the way you’re presenting yourself needs to be adapted to peek interest. If you are using pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns then you should be monitoring the spend, the click throughs & the conversion rate.
It is important to know what your campaigns & marketing are designed to achieve. This isn’t the same for every business. If you are focused purely on sales, you will probably fall flat on your face. Good marketing leads to confidence & trust in your brand, where as a bad sales technique can have the opposite effect & will drive potential customers to your competition (who are more likely to be less about the sales & more about building long lasting relationships). Remember small business owners generally buy from other small business owners they like, know & trust. Being overly sales orientated diminishes your trust factor.
Don’t blindly go from one type of marketing to another. There are so many businesses out there that will try to sell you marketing solutions, where you are told one solution is a panacea for all your needs. You need to develop a strategy & realise that for most businesses a multi-channel approach is the way to go. You should innovate your marketing, if something does not work, accept this fact & move to the next relevant solution. That might be an alternative platform or vehicle, but it could be a change of your messaging or who your real target audience is. Don’t see changing direction (& by default brining some innovation to the table) as a weakness or a failure. If you stubbornly follow a path that is not working then this is a recipe for disaster. Your greatest opportunity to learn about your business, your marketing & where your product or service sits in the marketplace is through the things that don’t work as well as you might have hoped. You can, then make informed decisions that keep you & your business in your customer’s line of sight. Once again you will have innovated to keep you relevant.
Final Thoughts
Change can be scary, but all the changes I have suggested are relatively easy to implement for your business. It’s a bit of gentle boat rocking. The good thing is that all of the options can be accessed via a laptop, a desktop or a smartphone, so whichever is your go-to device you can make the transformation from your technology comfort zone & in so doing take away some of the fear.
It is unlikely that you will master any of these options the first time you turn your hand to them, so practice makes perfect. The more you do the more adept you will become in new applications, the more proficient you will be in finding ways to innovate in your business & the better placed in general to grasp the nettle of new opportunities as they arise.
Now you have read this article, I hope you are inspired?
Take the time to inspire others by sharing it to your favourite social media solution.
It's easy just click on the icon below to share.
