There is many reasons why we would like to strengthen our marketing skills. Perhaps you are running your own small selling business on Facebook or starting your journey as a senior manager. Whatever the reasons are, here we will explore some main points around the marketing sector to supercharge your knowledge and skills.
I wanted this post to be motivational and encourage you to reach to the bottom of yourselves and able to show it out there.
As I mentioned in my previous blogs, it is very important to look after 3 main areas to be successful: Personal Development, Essential Skills, and Business Skills.
Personal development is our ability to stay on track and being productive. Essential skills are our abilities to provide value and finally, Business Skills, which I will be talking about today. Business skills are the difference maker for gaining recognition and attract what we want to achieve.
The first fundamental question would be: Where do you want to see yourself 12 months down the line? Today is 6th April 2021, and we need to see our situation right now. Look on what is holding you back from achieving the goal you have set to yourself?
Some classic answers would be that you are too old, not smart enough, not educated enough, afraid of failing, have no money etc.
The thing is, all the answers are our limiting beliefs. It is our mindset and it can be changed.
The true thing is that you may not only be very good at what you do, but you can be the best one.
Creating your successful self takes effort, investment and time. It is important to invest in your learning and development from the beginning. Having the right strategy and systems in place is the key to success.
Proper professional planing prevent poor performance.
Think about what do you currently have to do to be successful? What is your strategy? What is your plan?
There could be many ideas, but question is, whether you can truly use effectively the strategies you have developed to market yourself well. This is what I will be talking about. Its about your attitude to yourself and what you do. Very often we have a great developed personal skills and essential working skills, but why we are not succeeding? Perhaps its the way we market ourselves. I understand this is frustrating. We need to commit ourselves and learn how to get ourselves out there right. We want to have the knowledge to sell ourselves, for people to find us and want what we have to offer.
Its about understanding on how to use different tools. Whether it is social media, networking, work meetings or day-to-day interactions. You want others to see your own "brand". If you want to succeed, you need to learn the best skills and this will separate you from others. If we want to learn something we need to go deep enough to get the essence of it.
You don't have to get into a certain market, you can create your own.
In order to do so, we must be comfortable in making mistakes, learn from them and do something different.
The first fundamental thing would be to know what you are and create the journey of who you are to people you interact with. Get clear on your specific goal. Create the journey that others will have when interacting with you. Create impactful content and get an effective 'reach' with it. You may need to understand how to built your little community. Find out what different social media and tools can do to you. When you can market it, you will get a substantial growth.
So, how do we built engaged audience? To answer this question it is important to know who do you want to work with, and what can you help them with. Think about who is your target community and what you have to offer. What is it you can work with them on. The more specific we are with it, the better. By doing it, you have saved yourself a lot of time.
Demographics
When you start thinking about your ideal client you need to think about demographics. What does your avatar looks like? You can list few things that are based on the demographics. This could be age, gender, income, occupation, education, family or relationship status or cultural.
Psychographics
Psychographics is what your avatar care about. What is there that is important to them. What is their mindset, interest or hobbies, their values and personality types? Try to find out what are the things important to them. Let them resonate with you.
Circumstance
Think about circumstance and what they want to do. What end goal you want to take them towards? These are the things that will help you define your target audience.
Social media
Be clear on who your want your content and program to help. Once you have determined their demographics, psychographics and circumstance you can think about what are you going to get out there. This is mainly to help to solve their problems. If your audience is too wide you will struggle.
The biggest thing to make is to be everything to all people.
Here, you need also consider what is your primary resource, and what you want to become as the specialist. You need to narrow it down and in effect you start removing the competition as you are the expert. You become the 'go to' person and need to make decisions about the community and how can you stand out from the crowd. Write down the key decisions you need to make in order to do that. This way you will beed to but your own unique marketing approach. You could create marketing approach that works for you.
What are your values?
Start thinking about principles and values. Reputation is important. You will find yourself in situations when your principles will be in conflict very often. But if you were guaranteed that something will bring the results you want, would you commit to it? This is the way your avatar will think. Is this guaranteed? How would you respond to that? This of course is a challenge and there are things you need to do first to be ready for that. You need to know what is important to you. What kind of person you want to be.
There are different type of values: competence, excellence, money, competition, change, challenge, stability, status, strength, integrity and so on. What do you think about yourself? Consider 3 values which you want to take to the highest level and how do you want to do that. How are you planning to live up to these values? Every step of yours will need to be based on them and you always want to keep them in your heart. Take time to think about how are you going to walk that talk.
One of the way, would be to give promise to your values.
Put out there, what you are all about. What is important to you. Let others to get you know better. Think about your principles carefully and share them with others. Think about what a great plan would do for you here. What will give you more engagement is to show who you are and what you can do to people you want to meet and engage.
The definition of your sustainable self is the bottom line.
Most people who will want to work with you, they will do their due diligence. They will check you out. They will research and want to see what you represent. Don't let yourself down. Every minute you spend on your brand development its an investment. One of the biggest traps however is procrastination. Take action as you want to succeed. Getting your right presence right need to start now, and put others in the position to find you and understand what you want to communicate.
Next Step
After you have determined your target audience and dig deep into you values you want to show off, it is time to think about what you are doing at the moment in terns of your engagement. Or, better, perhaps what you are not doing to engage with them? One may suggest that having your own website is a good start. These days, anyone can get a website. However the fundamental question would be: if someone comes to your website or your social media what would they find? Is it professional enough? Would people find the content they looking for? Do you regularly provide high quality content? Is it consistent?
If the answer to those above questions is no, than we need to start looking at our social media. Most of people will look you up and you want to get that traction. The minute you hit the social media actively, people will start looking you up. Now is the time to act.
By starting early, you will learn.
Acting and analysing is important here. You may put some content out there and watch what gets the attention. That will help you at the early days to create your direction. Look for feedback on what they are looking for and use it in creating program, services and help they need.
The typical problem we hear is that we don't know how to find the audience, people we want to engage with, customers. Often we also don't know how to post high quality content and we are ending up spending hours and hours on social media because none of it leading to any opportunities. But, if you don't get started you have already lost. Don't be afraid of making mistakes. Stand alone with your unique self, product, service, content. These days social media is the major tool of doing any business so we need to get our grip on it. You are going to do your marketing and that's how you get the ones you want to attract.
With social media there are things to look at. You have already identified the audience and the type of media you want to use. Than you look at creating copy that leads to sales. You will do that with your own personality and your own UNIQUE content. Finally, you are going to have to get on the right platform, Lets have a look at those.
Your audience and their circumstances will determine the platform to use. The audience you are going to be selling to will dictate where you find them. You need than to be the person of value who will solve the problem they have.
The strategy is simple, find the problem and solve the problem.
That's why people come back to you, because you solve their problem. Create your content around that. And, don't worry about giving some of it for free. This will pay off. Give away great content, because thats what bring connection and trust. People do business with people they know, like and trust.
What about the media? Social media and catching attention on social media is competition. You are not competing with other professionals, but with other content creators.
You are going to have great visuals.
The visuals is something people like. Use visual images. Facebook posts with photos receive 37% increase in engagement. We need to think about using our images right. Videos perform even better than photos or image based advertising. They get as twice as much engagement and click-through rates.
If you have an important message to give do video and do life video. This is because its a conversation you have. It is you speaking to that person. Get comfortable in from of the camera. It takes a little bit of practice, but you will see the benefits very quickly. People like to see what you are doing and how you up to being the scenes.
You also have to make you you make point to your post. Do it with a purpose. Think about what you want people to do when you post. Have purpose with what you are doing. At this point you are going to have a closing conversation. This way you can create an opportunity to take people to your next step.
Your next step is invitation to sale. I have covered this on one of my previous blogs about what drives purchasing decisions.
I hope you enjoyed this article. The aim was to motivate you and take action now with few tips on how to get in front of your audience, create value and have conversion conversation with those who you want to attract.
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