Understand Your Own Marketing Strategy

by | August 8, 2022

To Ensure You’re Investing in the Right Support

It’s easier than you think for marketers to waste part of their budget.

A recent report found that “Advertisers are spending roughly a tenth of their budgets on clickbait sites.”

This is what advertising on a clickbait site looks like: 

Via Marketing Brew

THE HORROR. 

It’s everything you HATE about digital marketing: 

  • Placement on a disreputable, unethical website
  • In-your-face, disruptive ads that take over the page
  • No connection from the content to your business
  • No understanding of the audience for your business…
The fact that major brands and companies are wasting money on these sleazebag clickbait sites further cements my call to you to please learn more about marketing, so you can avoid wasting money in your small business.

I understand no one reading this article works in big-corporation marketing, and most of you have pretty meager budgets when it comes to advertising spend. For those of us who don’t have money to throw in the garbage — 🙋🏻‍♀️🙋🏽🙋🏿‍♂️ — it’s imperative we know how and where we’re actually spending it. All 100% of it. 

That means knowing how to direct before you delegate — having an overall marketing strategy first, and then divvying up parts of the plan.

I used to get a lot of inquiries from early-stage entrepreneurs searching for someone to “do their social media.” But when I spoke with them about what they wanted to achieve on social, they were not entirely sure… They just knew they weren’t spending time or energy there, and it seemed important to do so.

Running your own business introduces you to a billion new challenges, skills and lessons.

So, entrepreneurs get pretty comfortable with “not entirely sure.” And it’s admirable to focus on the pieces of your business that cater to your experience, knowledge and strengths — and delegate the rest of it.

But how successful will it be to hire someone to handle your social media if there’s no larger direction than “be present”? 

Social media (just like email or video content or your website…) is one point on your marketing mind map. It’s a pretty meaningless time-waster when floating off in the distance, disconnected from the other points in your marketing strategy.

When you hire someone new to run a piece of your strategy, you should be introducing them to that larger marketing map.

What’s the ideal audience you’re trying to grow? How does your social media connect to your website traffic? What are the goals you have related to the relationship between the two? Where are you sourcing visuals for social? What about copy? 

If you can’t explain these connections, you aren’t yet ready to delegate. It might be a waste of money. 

In my Confident + Consistent Marketing course, there are multiple lessons on each of the fundamentals of modern marketing: your audience, your website, your copy & content, your email and your social media. These modules give you a basic understanding of each of these pillars first, then walks you through how you can tie them all together in a marketing plan in the final unit. 

Many of my Grounded Marketing Mentorship participants work through the course in our 12 weeks together, and create a marketing plan for my review after the program comes to a close. 

Once they have a solid plan, they could absolutely hire someone to help them execute it. At that point, there’s far less of a chance they’ll waste 10% of spending on bad ads or fluffy copywriting… Or end up spamming an audience they’d never be interested in in the first place.