Day: October 13, 2021

A clear content marketing strategy will help you produce faster, better content with less guessing and less stress.

I know you’re a busy business owner, but hear me out: When you take some time to think about what you want to be known for, who your ideal customers are, and how you can serve them with your content (and ultimately your services), your content will DO THE WORK FOR YOU.

Which means more sales, more money, and more time. Here’s how to start:

WRITE DOWN YOUR BUSINESS GOALS

Goals can include awareness, lead generation, relationship building, or showing your expertise.

FOCUS ON THE TRANSFORMATION

Consider how you address your customer’s pain points and the transformation they experience after your solution. This pain point-solution-transformation sequence should be the foundation of your content.

CREATE CONTENT THEMES BASED ON YOUR GOALS

Think of 3-5 topics you want to be known for that you can talk about in your content. For instance, I talk about marketing, style, entrepreneurship, and mindset.

DO YOUR RESEARCH

Use tools like Wordtracker, Display Purposes, and BuzzSumo to determine the most relevant hashtags, keywords, and posting topics.

CREATE A CONTENT CALENDAR

Create a calendar based on your content themes. Plan when you’ll post, what you’ll post, and which platforms you’ll use. The more you figure out up front, the more consistent and effective your content will be.

With the right strategy in place, your content will do the work FOR you.

If you want your content marketing to contribute to the growth of your business and your bottom line, your strategy should be to lead your followers and readers down your sales funnel so they’re primed to buy from YOU, saving you time and energy.

Looking for more ways to streamline your content marketing, get clear on your process and save time?

Setting goals is easy. Achieving them, well… that’s another story.

For a lot of entrepreneurs, goal setting is the easy part. It’s taking the actions that get you to your goals that can be a challenge. So here’s a tip:

DEVELOP ROUTINES THAT SUPPORT YOUR GOALS.

Let’s break it down:

If your goal is a steady stream of client work, you need to make consistently selling part of your routine.

If your goal is getting up earlier, you need to make going to bed earlier part of your routine.

If your goal is to master a new skill, you need to make learning and practicing that skill part of your routine.

Quick story:

At the beginning of the year, I decided to create a food prep routine to support my goal of eating at least one serving of fruits and vegetables with each meal. I decided Sunday evening would be THEE time.

But that first Sunday rolled around and y’all, I did NOT feel like chopping kale. I was already on the couch, I’d finished my weekly planning, and getting off my butt to do Yet Another Thing was just…tew much.

So I decided to trick myself: I added food prep to to the end of my grocery pickup routine.

It worked! Adding to a current, already established habit was much easier: the necessary tools were out, I was already in the kitchen, and it felt like a natural flow from one task to the next.

Doing something 80% of the time instead of 0% of the time is a TRIUMPH.

A few tips for developing new routines:

1. START SMALL

Set aside 5-10 minutes at the beginning. Your goal is to establish the habit of starting The Thing, not necessarily finishing it. All you need to focus on at first is showing up.

2. BEGIN WITH THE BASICS

Take time to figure out how to set things up, which tools to use, and the best way for YOU to do things. Be patient with yourself the way you’d be patient with anyone learning something new.

3. ADD TO A CURRENT ROUTINE

You can gradually add more steps to a current routine if there’s a natural flow from one task to the next. Atomic Habits calls this “habit-stacking”.

The more easily your new routine fits into your current lifestyle, the easier it will be to stick to. See story above.

4. TAKE YOUR GOALS SERIOUSLY

For me that means putting things on my calendar; for you it may mean hiring a coach, taking a course, or working with an accountability partner.

5. DON’T EXPECT PERFECTION

You WILL mess up or miss a day (or five). That’s OK, life happens. Don’t give up completely because you missed a day/session/meeting. I like to shoot for 80% completion—hey, a C is a passing grade. Doing something 80% of the time vs. 0% of the time is a TRIUMPH.

Once you master creating routines to help you achieve your goals, you’ll easily make progress on anything you want to do.

If you need help figuring out which routines will help you reach your goals and how to break them down into small, actionable pieces you’ll actually DO, contact me and I’ll help you get the ball rolling.

Need help taking that first step?

When the pandemic pulled up, small businesses were hit hard.

But I had an idea.

I especially enjoy working with entrepreneurs and Creators, so the OTR Chamber of Commerce is one of my favorite clients.

The OTRCC has always led the charge to promote and support neighborhood businesses, but with Covid-19 cases surging just in time for the 2020 holiday season and people gravitating towards online shopping, they needed to try something new that made it easier for folks to buy local.

After conducting research on the retail industry and analyzing results from a survey of local businesses, I proposed a promotion highlighting local e-commerce as part of a larger campaign.

#OTRisOnline combined curation, storytelling, and influencer marketing in a focused Instagram campaign that made it convenient and fun to shop local.

I created shoppable links to Instagram posts using linkin.bio and worked with TetherCincy photographers Kevin J. Watkins and James Bates to quickly create images of 30+ local merchants!

Services for this project included:

My experience in Media Analysis, Editorial Styling, Graphic Design, Photo Shoot Production, Copywriting, and Project Management all played a role in making this promotion a success.

As a result, the #OTRisOnline campaign played a key role in promoting local e-commerce and directly drove sales to neighborhood businesses!

If you or your business are interested in creating magazine-style content that sells FOR you, send me a message or set up a chat—I’d love to help!

Need help taking that first step?

OK, so last year was a little rough. But 2021 can be whatever we want it to be.

After a year of obstacles (we shall overcome

The whole point of building your personal brand is because people need to know, like and trust YOU.

What do the Targets and Nikes and Apples of the world have in common with your favorite actors, musicians, and influencers?

 

They each have a distinct brand that people know, like and trust enough to buy.

 

Their brand tells their story: How they came to be, the experiences that shaped them, how they see the world.

 

Their brand communicates their vision: What type of world they want to create for the people they care about.

 

Their brand has a look: The visuals and colors they use, how they use style and imagery to clarify, emphasize, and convey their message.

 

Their brand has a voice: How they talk, the words they use (and the words they don’t.)

 

Yes, people know these brands and people because they have big platforms and (sometimes) a lot of money, but that wouldn’t matter if you couldn’t tell them apart. If they didn’t have their own distinct vision, story, look, and voice, TarNikApp would barely register on our collective cultural radar.

 

They’ve managed to combine the things that people pay attention to in an appealing way: A clear brand + consistent exposure.

 

The good news (or not-so-good news depending on what day it is) is that in this day and age, you don’t need to spend a ton of money or build a huge platform to have either of those things.

A clear brand + consistent exposure are key.

Storytime!

There’s a woman I’ve been following on social media for a while, and I started following her because it seemed like I saw her everywhere.

 

She was at conferences and hosting workshops and quoted in articles. Online, she was always posting about being a #girlboss and traveling to speak and promoting her brand. But I had no idea what she actually did.

 

I went to one of those conferences and she was there, at the head of a line of people waiting to speak to her. “Oh, that’s [redacted],” I said to a fellow attendee. “I’ve seen her around, but what does she actually DO?”

 

The people around me shrugged; they didn’t know either. But they still got in line to talk to her.

 

That’s when I realized: it didn’t really matter that people didn’t know what she did. What mattered was that people knew who she was.

 

It’s the opposite of what most of us have been taught about hard work and learning valuable skills and developing our talents. But I’ve seen “who knows you is more important that what you do” play out in too many different scenarios to call it a fluke.

 

And it’s not that hard work, talent, etc. are not valuable. They are. It’s just that people want to know who you are before they’ll really pay attention to what you do.

 

As an if-I-just-work-hard-enough-people-will-notice introvert it was a painful realization.

 

But then I started to see the value in exposure, for being known for your story vs your skills, because that’s the way people truly connect. There’s no need for hateration in this dancerie because we all have a story.

 

If you want people to hire you/invest in you/collaborate with you because you’re so damn talented (and you are!), they have to know who you are FIRST. And the best way to make that happen is to build YOUR brand.

 

You don’t have to wait until you’re “ready” to take action. Check out these resources, sign up for my email list, and set up a chat so we can figure out the best way to make sure people know YOU.

Need help taking that first step?

Then you need a PowerUP Session! That’s how I help you unpack your thoughts, create a clear vision that aligns with your goals, and take ACTION to get you started. Learn more.