“I know I need to market myself more, but…”

Do you hear other business owners say this as much as I do? Do you say it yourself? I know I do!

The truth is, we all know how important marketing is for our businesses and we even have great intentions when it comes to trying to check it off on our ‘vital business practices’ to do list. That’s not the issue.

We don’t do it enough (or at all) because marketing yourself is freaking hard.

I mean, first of all, who has the time?! Between juggling client projects, putting out all the little fires that flare up in your biz daily, and just doing all the tasks it takes to run a business, marketing is often one of the very first things to fall off your radar… and your to do list.

Secondly, it’s hard to talk about yourself – even if you know you rock at what you do. It feels icky. It feels braggy. It feels like no one wants to hear it.

And as small businesses we certainly don’t have nice, juicy marketing budgets laying around to pay someone else to take care of it for us.

Maybe most of all is simply that ‘marketing’ sounds more like, “MAAARRRKETTTTTINNNNGGG, mwuahahahaha!!!!!!” when we hear it in our heads.

Marketing is by far one of the most overwhelming concepts in Business Ownership Land.

There’s so much to learn about it. So many tactics we could / should try. Such overwhelming amounts of information weighing down blogs and articles and Pinterest boards galore.

It’s all just too much and it feels like a big ol’ hairy, scary beast that we never quite know how to slay.

Or even where the heck to start.

The good news is that, as a writer for interior designers, I’ve made it my business to become an expert all things marketing for my clients. After all, everything I write for them – from website copy to blog posts to subscriber newsletters – is marketing in one form or another.

I’ve even learned to tame the marketing beast (or at least cut it down to size a little in my head) by thinking of marketing simply as a form of communication.

I mean, when you really unpack it, marketing is just talking to your prospects (whether in writing, on video, over the phone, or in person) about what you do, who you do it for, and how you do it differently from your competition, ultimately for the purpose of selling to the people you can best serve.

Seems a little less terrifying that way, doesn’t it?!

When you approach marketing from that perspective, a few things happen:

·      It stops being about money and starts being about serving others.

·      It makes it crystal clear what you need to communicate.

·      You realize people actually WANT you to talk about (market) your business because they need you. And after all, your marketing is most likely the only way they’re ever going to find you.

It’s so freeing to finally realize you don’t have to approach marketing as a rigid business practice. You don’t need to read volumes on it. You don’t need to have a budget to hire someone with a degree in it (which is counterintuitive anyway since you need to market your business to get clients to make money, right?!). You don’t even need to compose 1,000 tweets or gain 1,000,000 Instagram followers or anything that involves pie-in-the-sky numbers and impossible to accomplish tactics.

You just need to talk to your prospects about your business.

It’s all about thinking it through a little differently and being really strategic with how you spend your precious (and finite!) time and energy resources to market your business.

It really is possible to run your design business AND actively and effectively market it at the same time!

I want to share everything I’ve learned – from basic marketing communication concepts to social media tips and tricks – about marketing my clients’ interior design businesses over the last several years. And so I’ve created a great solution to get your marketing systems up and running.

I truly think this is going to revolutionize the way you approach marketing your business from now on. I know it works for me and for the clients I implement it for.

I’m super excited to share it with you and I’ll be giving you more details about it in the coming weeks so stay tuned! It’s nothing short of MIRACULOUS! (hint, hint, wink, nudge)

All the best,